Dabble #1 Completed!

Models

I activated my 30 day Unity Pro trial license a few days ago so we're frantically trying to finish this forest sprite demo. While Lou is coding like mad, I am going to share some of our models with you. We are using Maya 2013 to build and rig (where necessary) our assets. We are using Photoshop and Mari to texture our character and Unity to shade our assets. In Unity we have actually created our own "uber shader" which almost all of our assets are currently using. For now, the modeling.

Here's our set from our main camera with all of our assets referenced into a scene and dressed according to our artwork. The green bits are maya joints for some vegetation that will have some wind animation in Unity.

Here is the same set from a different camera to show our hackery. The beauty of working in context is that we can shape all of our dressing to our camera.

The log is detailed where it needs to be and sparse everywhere else

This is one of the flowers that also has a skeleton bound to it.

This is our forest sprite character. We are using our cache exporter and importer to bring our animation into Unity. 

Dabble #1 Realtime Forest Sprite

We work in the animation industry and we know how much it sucks to wait for renders to come back. So we're embarking on a little experiment. Inspired by Square-Enix's "Agni's Philosophy" and Unity's "Butterfly Effect", we want to see if we can create a near film quality shot/test/short in "real-time" in our free time. For this project, we are using Maya to create assets and set dress to a camera and Unity for shading, lighting, and rendering.

 Our test idea is centered around a tiny forest sprite running across a fallen log. This sprite actually came from a game idea we had but shelved because of our lack of DirectX11 (We're using Macs). Here are some initial artworks for the sprite. We are actually pretty far along on this project already (we've only spent 2 weekends so far), but we'll update the blog with pipeline scripts and pretty shaders we had to develop.