I want to say we're three weeks into the quarantine at this point, though I'll admit it's a bit difficult to keep track of time. Motivation has been low, so I've been attempting to give in to literally any creative whim that takes me, in hopes of accomplishing things. And at this oddly stagnated point in time, I'm considering anything that serves to beef up my portfolio to be an accomplishment!
One of my goals recently has been to get better with Unity environments, since I've so enjoyed the ones I've made before this point. I'd made exterior locations before, but never any interiors, so I decided last week that that would be my next project. Inspired by Skyrim and a love of wizards, I decided to make a wizard's home, cluttered with objects and artifacts and strange glowing plants.
The Unity free asset store provided, and I found myself with a perfect modular dungeon kit (see here!) and some other choice props. I started strong, learning from some of my past mistakes and making a pretty good pace for the first day or so of work.
Of course, learning from past mistakes really just means it's prime time to make new mistakes. I often go ham on the lighting for my environments, mostly because I don't currently have a boss telling me to use fewer point lights or I'm fired. That wouldn't ordinarily be terrible - except that I had accidentally set every light in the scene as Realtime rather than Baked!
I simply could not understand why my performance was atrocious. After all, I had used low poly models, and I learned from my teammates in Sunset Caldera that one should not just use mesh colliders for everything. I thought I was doing everything right! One of my friends caught the mistake though when I asked for help, and also brought to my attention that the main camera (not the one attached to the FPS controller) was still enabled and rendering!
After some tweaks and multiple hours of lightmap baking, the performance suddenly worked like a charm. It's amazing what you can do when you're not being ridiculous with your lighting!
However, there was now a new problem to deal with. I had left in the mesh colliders for the walls, floors, and staircases - they were low poly and I'd removed all the unnecessary colliders from the props and stuck box colliders on the furniture, so I figured I'd save myself some work leaving the mesh colliders on for the building itself. For some reason though, whenever I would export the Windows build, the walls and floor would act as if they had no colliders at all! You could walk through walls, fall through the stairs, and the second floor was inaccessible.
While nobody could figure out why the mesh colliders refused to work in my build, my friends and classmates helped me figure out workarounds. With box colliders, invisible walking planes, and a little bit of luck, I eventually got the building to start acting like a building. I'm still honestly not sure how I got the spiral staircase to start behaving - it's not something that will let me fudge colliders - but somehow we did get there in the end. This morning I added some final fixes based on user feedback, threw in some particles for dramatic effect, and called it finished!
I definitely learned a lot from this project, and I'm happy I took the time to learn from mistakes and improve it. I definitely go a little extra when it comes to lighting, but hey, it's a personal project. I'll be conservative with lighting resources when I need to - for now I'm just trying to build some pretty stuff!
Want to see the finished project? Head over to my portfolio for a walkthrough video, screenshots, and links to the playable build!