i feel like a lot of progress has occured since my last DevLog. i have been working on the menu system for my game and have a rudimentary build already playable on my phone.

the menu system was way easier to setup than i had expected, primarily due to Unity’s GUI/Event System and their extensive online documentation and Learn platform. the hardest part were generating the graphic elements for the UI to implement… i didn’t want a bunch of default graphics making my game all “straight-out-of-the-box” looking.

to generate the sprites, i went with 3D again in Maya, as with the graphic for the joystick. seeing as i already figured out the workflow from said joystick, loading up that project and modeling a quick gear from a cylinder made it pretty fast the second time around.

generally, i render a 1k square with the Arnold occlusion node at around 16 samples for my graphic geometry and use the Arnold shadow mask node on a ground plane that i move the graphic geo into a little bit so they interpenetrate. it is sometimes necessary to use what i call AO blockers or adjust the occlusion spread to get the desired effect.

blockers are basically just geometry with everything turned off inside the render stats, with the exception of “Casts Shadows”. the goal here is to have a mostly white render, with subtle occlusion around the fringe, as the object can/will be tinted the appropriate base color in Photoshop if necessary or more commonly and less destructively inside Unity. the blockers can help when your image is too washed out.

it’s important to note that, as mentioned above, you can edit the resulting render until your heart is content inside Photoshop once it’s done, which was necessary in my case to adjust the alpha channel generated by the shadow mask. another hint, is that Unity expects alphas to be premultiplied eith black.

i still wonder about Unreal Engine 4, moreso now that i have learned that they apparently offer some sort of free model. i should probably look into it and maybe at least use it to showcase models in the engine or something for portfolio diversity… but i already have a game art portfolio, i need a game design one… although any time i can save by building them up simultaneously is welcome.