In July 2012, I did an industrial placement at Border Black Ltd (which is located in Middlesbrough) and I spent 6 weeks being their 3D Artist. Border Black Ltd are a company which specialises in creating 3D apps for businesses. This means that businesses can showcase their products/services in a 3D environment on a mobile (or web) platform such as IOS or Android. Their apps are powered by Unity, a widely used game engine.
During my time there, I helped to develop several mobile (and web) app demos. My job was mainly to create all the 3D elements inside of the app although I did help out during bug testing process. I implemented all my assets into the engine and created all the textures used by the 3D models.
During my time there, I helped to develop several mobile (and web) app demos. My job was mainly to create all the 3D elements inside of the app although I did help out during bug testing process. I implemented all my assets into the engine and created all the textures used by the 3D models.
Stopping Distances Demo
The Car
The first app I helped develop was an demo called "Stopping Distances" which showed users, in real-time, how long it would take for a car to brake on different road conditions at different speeds (for example, 70mph on a wet road surface).
My first job was to take an existing car model and optimise it for use in this app, however since their existing car model was built in many separate elements and it was quite highly detailed, I had to build the low-poly model from scratch. One good thing about the existing car model was that I could use it for my high poly detail bake (which I did) as the model was solidly built. Since this car would only be seen from one static camera angle I tailored the UVs so that the back of the car would be more detailed than the front of the car. At the time however, I had included a tyre in the UV sheet but as you can see from the IOS screenshot above...you can't see it and due to time constraints I didn't go over the UVs to maximise texture space.
My first job was to take an existing car model and optimise it for use in this app, however since their existing car model was built in many separate elements and it was quite highly detailed, I had to build the low-poly model from scratch. One good thing about the existing car model was that I could use it for my high poly detail bake (which I did) as the model was solidly built. Since this car would only be seen from one static camera angle I tailored the UVs so that the back of the car would be more detailed than the front of the car. At the time however, I had included a tyre in the UV sheet but as you can see from the IOS screenshot above...you can't see it and due to time constraints I didn't go over the UVs to maximise texture space.
The Diffuse, Specular and Normal Maps used by the car in the Demo. © Border Black Ltd 2012
The Environment
As well as making the car that was used, I also created the environment that was used in the app and created some variants of the texture to depict the different surfaces. We also used changed the shader to suit the surface (we used reflections for the wet surface and changed the specular value). Since this was my first project using Unity, I didn't know how to implement Lightmapping properly (it wasn't until a few weeks into my placement that I learned how to do it) and thus there are no shadows in the app.
For the road, we used a tiling road texture (created by me) and for the trees, they were just flat 2D planes as the camera was in a static position.
For the road, we used a tiling road texture (created by me) and for the trees, they were just flat 2D planes as the camera was in a static position.
Enspec VArComp App
The Diffuse, Specular and Normal Maps used by the Enspec "outside" model in the App. © Border Black Ltd 2012
For this app, I went over their current model ( which was 60k tris at the time) and heavily optimized it for the game engine. I had to build my own low poly version of the "outside" view of the model and to keep the tri count down for the "exploded" view of the model, I divided the original models into smaller modular pieces; optimized and unwrapped the UVs so that I could fit them all into 1 diffuse texture.
This was a great exercise in modularity for me!
This was a great exercise in modularity for me!
iHome Demo
For this demo, I optimized the model (which was created by Paul Li) and I provided the textures (which were tiling) for it.
I thoroughly enjoyed my placement at Border Black Ltd as I worked with some very talented professionals and they were a joy to work with! I hope that some day I will work with them again!
