This is the base design for my room that I will draw and fill out properly with objects to convey how my room will look.
I chose Gravity as the element for my room. As the character enters the room everything will be either upside-down or floating and the key will be visible but the player will not be able to reach it due to it being too high up.
There’s going to a lever in the room that is hidden by floating boxes and obstacles, the player will have to push the boxes out of the way to reveal the lever, then pull the lever down to revert the room's Gravity back to normal. The key and all objects will drop down and the player can pick the key up and unlock the door to the next room. I will be modeling my own lever for my room.
On to the 3D Modelling:-
I didn't take screenshots of the very first step but I started off with a blank scene then I added a Mesh Plane to the scene. With this Mesh square Plane, I sliced it top to bottom and left to right so that the Plane now had four faces and four edges. I choose two edges that met at a 90-degree angle and extruded them four meters along the Z-axis. I then selected all four faces and two of the edges that I wanted to delete, then deleted them. This left me with a rectangle-shaped Plane which was the foundation of the rest of my walls. With the new Plane, I took the right-hand side edge and extruded the edge five meters along the X-axis, this made a corner piece which can be seen in the forefront of the screenshot below and the extended wall piece can also be seen below. I repeated similar steps to make the other corner behind the extruded long wall, but instead, the edges were extruded along the Y-axis.
After the wall segment was completed I started splitting the Plane up into smaller faces to allow finer detail adjustments to be made in the future. As shown I added cuttings to resemble that of skirting boards along the top and bottom of the model as well as adding panels to the walls to make it easier when it comes to texturing and Smart UV Mapping. Then, I extruded the skirting boards outwards to actually materialize the idea that they are meant to be skirting boards, I made sure to not smooth the edges of the skirting out because the theme for our Cabin is for it to be wooden, and we as a group want the olden style cabins with the rough wood cuttings, in theory, this just adds to the idea we are trying to convey.
Once the wall sections were divided up into panels and the skirting was extruded, I made a doorway, I did this by simply taking one of the wall's panel sections and the skirting beneath it and deleting the faces that were there, this gives the illusion of a doorway. I chose to not make a window because I want the sole focus of my room to be centered around the gravity aspect of my element and I didn't want an outside scene to ruin the immersion.
Next came the texturing, so to make my life easier in the future I started off with completely separating and dividing the wall into segments to allow the segments to be moved and rearranged later on, which in turn will make up the whole of my room. To which I then exported the model to my unity scene so I could see how it will look. I also made a new material and attached it to all the panels so that the texturing and applying the textures becomes easier in the future.
The screenshot below shows my model that has been UV mapped to get it ready for texturing, I saved the project and headed over to Substance Painter. When in Substance Painter I started a new project and imported my Model file into the scene.
I baked the mesh map of the Room Walls model and then started playing around with the many textures that Substance Painter(SP) has to offer. When the desired textures were applied and I was happy with the coloring and the appearance of the walls I changed up the roughness and glossiness so that the walls weren't as reflective under a light source. Wooden walls may appear a little shiny/glossy in real life due to treatments so I wasn't particularly focused on lowering this factor completely.
After the texturing in Substance Painter was completed I exported the textures as a Unity HD Render Pipeline(Metalic standard) template. This template gives me the correct texture maps that align with Unity's Material(that are used to apply textures with) texture map settings to allow smooth transferal of the textures straight over from SP. This means that the texturing I did in SP will be imported over to Unity to make the model look the exact same.
Now that the individual walls are textured I can start putting my room together by slotting all the walls together to make a room. This can be done in Blender and then I can export the FBX model to unity and it will be exported into the scene with the textures already attached and without me needing to do anymore to the model.
Next comes the flooring of the room, this is consists of a floor panel that has been duplicated multiple times to cover the area of the flooring of the room. I've attached a material to the panel that labels it as flooring again for ease of application in SP and Unity.
The flooring doesn't really have a detailed UV Map due to it just being one plane being reused over and over again. when I baked the mesh in SP the ambient occlusion made it so that the tile had a very weird shadow going across it and it made the flooring look very odd as if all the lighting in the room was messed up. So I opted to not use the ambient occlusion that SP gave it and found my own, from google, this one also had wood grains to make the texture look like wooden floor tiles. This can be found here. After all the flooring tiles were complete I combined them all together to make one mesh.
Once I was happy with the texturing of the flooring looked like wooden floor panels I exported the textures into Unity and this is what it looks like, the exact effect I wanted!
Next, I need to add a roof to the room, so I did a similar thing to the ceiling that I did to the floor, but I just duplicated the flooring as a whole and moved it so it was at the height of the top of the walls.
From this point onward I remember that wooden cabins tend to have roofs that are pointy, due to it providing a stronger structure than flat wooden roofs. In order to make the roof have the pointed effect that I am going for I select the vertices in the middle parts of the roofing and move them upwards. This makes the mesh stretch and will not alter the texturing of the model. When I'm happy with the height of the roof I add a material to the roofing and label it Wood Roof or something similar to that again, due to the roofing having different sized planes and multiple planes the UV Map was far more detailed than the flooring.
I take the roofing straight to SP again from here and texture it again. I did have some issues with applying textures to the roofing and I had to make many different layers and play around with the rotation of the textures a lot using black masks but in the end, I had a roof that had the wood groovings going the correct direction. This is my room completely textured, I'm so pleased with the turnout.
I exported the textured from SP and started adding them to materials in Unity so that I could then apply the materials to the room model. The lighting is a slight bit messed up in this picture but that's because I need to adjust it so that the room is lit correctly.
So now I have my room fully constructed, it's time to add in my objects and some of my groupmates' objects to make it look like an actual room. I start off with my own, I added my Cardboard boxes to my room so that I could make a start on getting them all in. I added Rigidbodys and Box Colliders to the cardboard boxes and mesh colliders to every part of the room: the walls, floor, and roof. The theme of my room is gravity so there are some objects that will not have gravity and cardboard boxes come under that category. The gravity on the cardboard boxes has been disabled, this will make them float in the room which is the exact effect that I want them to have.
I've added some more props to the scene, these shelves belong to Miguel.
And this is the view that the player has of the game. Just a bunch of objects floating around in the room.
I played around with the idea of having all objects float in the room but I felt this would make the room so disorganized and unappealing to the Player, also harder for the player so I have decided to only have a few objects that float, these will be the Cardboard boxes and the Key that the Player will use to escape the room to move on to the next. Instead of having a load of objects floating around, I have taken away the Players lighting in the room to make it harder instead so they will have to search to leave the room, I have explained how I did this in my 'Lighting' blog but basically I added a Post-Processing Volume and deleted all previous lighting presets.
I removed Miguel's Shelves and swapped them out for his Bookcases, I thought they looked beautiful and they would better suit the theme of my room.
I also added Miguel's Table to my room along with my Chairs that I modeled around his table to try and match them. These are in the center of the room and the Key will fall onto the table when the Lever is pressed that will be added later on. The Chairs have Rigidbodys and Box Colliders but the Table only has a Box collider because I don't want the table to be able to move within the scene.
I added the Lever that I modeled to the scene, it's positioned behind a bunch of boxes, it only has a Box Collider attached as well because I don't want the actual model to move, but I want it to be able to be interacted with.
This is the Key model I have made, It is positioned at the top of the Room model, where the roofing is and there is also a separate Collider below it to stop the Player from being able to access it before the Lever has been pressed. This is going to be one of the items that will be floating so it has a Ridgidbody and a Box Collider which make it so that it can be interacted with in the future.
Lastly, is the addition of the Door that I modeled, there are two Doors in my scene, one at the entrance and one at the exit. Only the exit door has a Box Collider attached as it is the only Door that will be interacted with. I will not be animating this object and when it is unlocked the Door will be destroyed.
This is what the player will see when they load into my scene, my room has all the necessary components and game objects needed to make it work, I now just need to work on the scripting so it all runs smoothly together.
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