Tower ePortfolio Post

This assignment focuses on making two LODs for each model. We were to make a Unity scene themed for a mobile tower defense game. The goal was to create hipoly and lowpoly models and use Unity's LOD grouping system to save on processing power. When the camera is positioned at a distance from models a lowpoly replaces the original hipoly model in order to save on processing for the rendering. We also had to make five low poly props to decorate our scene.

The main issue encountered in this project was a misunderstanding of how to manage making LODs with Maya. What I should have originally done was read the Unity documentation and then ask before making my low poly models. Instead I assumed how to do this and so I took a more difficult route in completing low poly versions of models.

My incorrect process for this was starting with the low poly models and then making high poly versions based off of these originals. Additionally, I didn't UV my low poly models beforehand. This was not the root cause of my issue, but it added to the difficulty down the line.

I began UVing my low polys when I realized I would have to not only do it all over again for the high poly models, but also that I would need to perfectly allign the UVs over each other, a process I had never had to do before and seemed too daunting to be true. Luckily I was correct in that this was not true.

After recapping with the professor on how to properly do this I had to recreate my low poly models. The method we were meant to do was reducing our high poly models with Maya's "reduce" tool so that the UVs would remain identical. That way I could texture only the high polys in Substance painter and Unity would apply those textures to my low poly models with no difficulty.

This method in the end worked well, and saved lots of time from what I was originally planning on doing. I luckily had the time for this as I had managed my time very well in this assignment after learning from the last one a tough lesson. I worked on this project daily in 2-3 hour durations. I also planned out each step with my Trello board, something I had been doing before but not as efficiently. This is something that I feel is only improved on with experience, and now that I understand this pipeline I was able to accurately gauge the time that I needed to do this.