Tower for Mobile

Tower for Mobile

In this assignment we were required to make a tower for a top down mobile game. Our Tri-count needed to be under 600 tris for our low poly. We also had to make a high poly to bake onto our low poly to add more detail. Lastly we textured it in Substance Painter and exported it into Unity.

We were given a set of towers to use as reference:

 I chose to do the crossbow tower with my own sort of twist on it by changing the base. At first I was concerned about the tri-count that we were given because I thought it would be a struggle to achieve any type of roundness in the tower with a low tri-count. Fortunately I used soften edges a lot throughout this project and it really helped achieve the feel of roundness in the tower.

Wire Frames of my high and low poly tower

The project overall went pretty smooth, but I ran into one issue that I had a lot of trouble with. In this assignment we were supposed to bake pretty much all of our maps into the object, not only to achieve a more stylized look but also to improve efficiency in engine. During this I had an issue of my normal map not coming out as much as I would have liked. 

Screenshot from Substance Painter

As you can see I didn't get a lot of the detail of the stones coming out of the tower as much as I would have liked. I tried messing with my level tools and adjusting different parts of my baked maps such as Curvature, World Space Position, Etc. but I couldn't find anything to really make the stones come out. The only solution I had that worked was actually putting the normal map in a separate map like usual but that wasn't the point of the assignment since it's supposed to be efficient for mobile.

Base Color, Curvature, Normal and Ambient Occlusion Maps

Another issue that I ran into was I initially had the arrowhead and spikes as an iron material but quickly realized that I had to change them in Unity because we weren't using PBR in this project. So the arrowhead and the spikes looked white in Unity because we didn't use metal/roughness maps. So I swapped those to a different material and it worked great. 

Screenshot from inside Unity

Here is my tower duplicated from inside Unity. As I said earlier the stones didn't come out as much as I would like but overall I think the tower came out really well. Also considering that the model is made for mobile users most likely wouldn't see the stones anyway. I think I managed to accomplish a more stylized and an overall nice looking tower which is what I was hoping for. 

Finally here is my overall product in Sketchfab. I was happy to see what I could achieve with a low tri-count and one 1024x1024 map!

Stylized_Tower by Jburgenger on Sketchfab