Feast your eyes...
My new game, "Last Resort: Apocalypse", was submitted to the App Store on Thursday, March 24, and is awaiting approval. This was the culmination of 3 weeks of intense work, and I'm incredibly happy with the initial build. In order to ship as quickly as I did, there is only one variety of zombie at the moment, but that will change in the first update.
It's become painfully obvious that my portfolio needs a stronger emphasis on VR. To remedy this, I've polished-up my Google Cardboard Turret Shooter prototype into something much more stable. I'm also adding zombies. I was really always hoping to do something a little more original with this shooter, but it's pretty much been begging for zombies since Day 1. Now that I've got a final-quality zombie in-engine, I'll get a rough environment up and running before adding more zombies. The goal is to get this shipped to the App Store ASAP. Finished assets will be posted to a dedicated tab in the Models section.
Finally broke down and started playing with my Project Tango Dev Kit. This thing is AWESOME. Unfortunately, the mesh Constructor app doesn't quite work the way I thought it did: I assumed the color camera was producing an actual texture map on the fly, when in fact that data is being applied to the mesh as a vertex color. I can't decimate the mesh without losing color information, which means UV unwrapping these things at full resolution is gonna be... Interesting. Should be worth it, though: something came up that requires me to build a prototype with scanned rooms. More on that in a future post...
Finally sat down and explored the new PBR shader in Unity. It's been a while since I've done a good old-fashioned still life, so I found a couple of random objects in the back yard and went to work. After shooting some reference photos, I quickly free-modeled the assets in Blender so I could focus on the materials. Unity 5 offers two material workflows for its Physically-Based Shading: Metallic and Specular. For this first project, I used the Metallic workflow, since it more closely resembles the old material workflows I used for "Car Jumper". Once I understood the difference between Metallic and Smoothness parameters, I was shocked by the quality of the results. 3d rendering packages have had this functionality for years, but to see it in a realtime environment is extremely cool.
Group Shot
Various Reference Photos
Hose Nozzle 1
Hose Nozzle 2
Spade
