I got my grubby paws on a pile of really nice Creative Commons textures, so you’ll see a marked improvement in the materials used from here on out. So here we go with Week Three.
15 February: Campfire Rack, LOD A
A simple metal rack to throw on a campfire so your food doesn’t fall in the fire. If I added feet I could use it as a cooling rack you would put on your counter. Honestly, this is such a simple, basic model I might just use it as-is; some assets don’t need to be fancy to work. If you’re obsessing about how a wire rack sitting on your campfire looks in game, that’s more an indictment of your priorities or my utter failure to keep you interested in the rest of the game than the model itself.
16 February: Campfire, LOD A
Rocks and sticks. Start it on fire and it’ll keep you warm and give you a nice open flame for cooking or brewing a pot of tea. Add a rack and you have an old-fashioned barbecue grill. A variant version would use sticks instead of split firewood.
17 February: Shipping Container Shack, LOD A
An Alliance standard 10 x 2.5 x 2.5 meter shipping container repurposed as a shack. This being a quick mockup for prototyping purposes, it’s just a few cubes put together rather than fully functional. Since I plan to use a metric buttload of these in several projects, this baseline will see a lot of modification and variation. Because of this, I didn’t give the walls any thickness or cut holes for the door and windows; moving them later on is a hassle, and it’s much easier just to cut them in place as needed and work from there.
I’ll also do a 5m version, as well as 2.5m and 1m containers that haven’t been modified. There’s a project in the works that involves a lot of repurposed shipping containers as materials, so I’ll need the baseline containers to tweak into those objects as well.
18 February: Stairhead, LOD A
You know the weird little shack you see on the roof of an office or high-rise apartment building? That’s this guy right here. I used the same door I used on the shipping container shack, and a variety of metal textures for the shack, roof, and I-beam uprights.
19 February: Modular Framed Stone Wall, LOD A
This is based on a terrain piece I saw on Pinterest. Unlike their version, mine is a set of modular pieces I can combine to make all kinds of different walls and pillars. It consists of four pieces: a stone wall 2m wide, 2.5m tall, and .2m thick, an upright pillar .3m square and 2.5m tall, a horizontal piece .3m square and 1.8m long to fit between the pillars, and a .4m stone cube for use as an accent piece on corners or anywhere else. The pillars, horizontals, and cube could also be used to make doorways or ancient post and lintel arches.
This is a prime example of my modularity approach. By making the pieces fit a standard set of dimensions, I can make different versions of any of these and exchange them as needed. In an extreme example I could use these stone pieces to put together a starship interior and simply exchange them for a science fiction set later without disrupting anything. That’s also why it looks unfinished. I didn’t make the full ring of darker stone pieces or put cubes on multiple corners to show the parts rather than a specific application.
20 February: Bench With Backrest, LOD A
Good old-fashioned park or bus stop bench with a backrest. An upgraded version may have arms or a different seat style, or could be an inner city bus bench with concrete uprights on the ends and laminated particle board for the seat and back.
21 February: Mushroom, LOD A
It’s a basic toadstool type mushroom you can see almost anywhere. This one is about three inches tall. I haven’t textured it yet. Depending on what code I add to it when I make it a GameObject it could be a simple decoration or a collectible item the player can use for something.