Hi good people,

I'm still working on the virtual museum commission so I just want to give a status update..

Since the last post I have been working mostly on the Museum model in Blender and on improving the environment around the museum in Unity.
My goal for this museum is to make the graphics look as realistic as possible with the skills that I currently have. When I got the assignment it wasn't entirely clear what the deadline would be, they said three weeks, but luckily I got about three weeks of extra time to finish it..

I'm glad with the extra time because now I could spend more time on preparing and finding really good assets, like trees, grass and rock formations etc. The assets that I'm using the most come from a Unity demo project called The Book of the Dead and it has a bunch of really realistic looking 3D scanned/Photogrammetry trees rocks and grass assets. I always try to create as much assets as I can myself but making everything myself for a project like this is just impossible so I do my best to always improve the assets that I find and to also contribute back to the community what I can myself.
I'm happy that this is something that a lot of indie developers seem to 'just do':)

Acquiring assets for a game is never as easy as just downloading them and throwing them into a project because often things just break upon importing. Things like references to script components, shaders or materials. So basically every asset has to be checked, repaired and fine-tuned. 
This time it was especially hard because the Book of the Dead assets were meant to be used with the Unity HD-render pipeline and not the Universal one that I'm using, so every material had to be remade. 

Some other thing that always causes problems with each new project is getting the wind system to work with custom trees that weren't made with the built in Unity tree system (they never are). So I've spend a lot of time figuring out how to get some custom wind Shadergraphs to work in my project. 
I finally got the wind shaders to work today and now I feel really glad that I found those, because having wind shaders in Shadergraph's nodes structure is really useful for future projects!

Anyway, here are some screenshots to explain what has been going on:

• Placed reflection probes, this is before:
  
  
  
• After placing the reflection probes:
  
  
  
• Started putting together a main menu UI:
  
  
  
• Worked on waterfalls. Added particle systems to the waterfalls that emit from the waterfall's mesh:
  
• Placed Spotlights: (Don't place them to close to walls! It can cause them to turn on/off when not looking directly at them with the camera)
  
  
  
• Place occlusion areas to optimise occlusion culling during baking and at runtime:
  
  
  
• Created low-poly colliders for everything:
  
  
  
• Hung one of my own oil-paintings at the entrance to see what it looks like:D
  

That's it for now... Have any thoughts? Do let me know what you think!

Greets,
Tim

My Other Posts - https://www.publish0x.com/coster-graphics
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