This scene is a bit different from your basic scene, as it has a lot of traffic and a functional maglev system. So this is actually a replacement scene for the maglev station when you travel to the city hall.
The city hall location is central to the story as it will serve as a puzzle hub where you get multiple missions you can then complete in any order while you play, so that you always have multiple puzzles to think about and switch between.
City scene 3D modeling
Originally the city image was only 1024 x 1024 px. Which was really not enough. Luckily, Midjourney just rolled out a 2x and 4x upscaling. Like other tools, it does not have the UI in older generations, but by re-upscaling the original image from the thumbnail view, the new version has all the latest tools.
Read the rest of the city hall series: City hall scene part 1, part 2, part 3.
Even though I had made some edits to the city hall scene exterior image in Photoshop, the new high res image plugged right in and worked almost flawlessly. Well enough to work in the game.
Then I did the usual fSpy & blender stuff. In this case, the perspective did not work all that great as the image had been extended to many directions and the original generation was off center. But I dod not worry about this too much. You can only see it in the wonky reflections in the final image.
This was also the widest scene I have modelled so far in the game. I ended up modeling some of the buildings to mask out hologram screens and the traffic I would add, but most of the far-away background is simply the inside of a sphere.
Set up in Unity
In Unity I place the city hall scene exterior FBX into an empty template scene and plop in the player character for scale. Now I know how to scale the location to look correct with the character. After this, I will start to place in the hotspots and other gameplay functionality.
In this scene I have the maglev setup and some points of interest and an entrance to the city hall.
The navmesh for the scene is very simple. I mostly use cubes for my navmeshes. Sometimes I need a more elaborate setup, but most of the time simple cubes placed in the level will work just fine!
As stated, this scene has the maglev system included. The maglev fast travel map works trough the menu system. Using the map looks for an action list in the scene with a set ID, so it works quite well in any scene with any set of different functionalities. With a string variable telling the game which level to load up next.
The train model and animation is the exact same as was used in the maglev station scene. Only the fluid effects are missing as the current version of Zibra Effects was not compatible with unity 2023 at the time of screen capture.
Camera animation
The camera is also animated in this scene. But it is very very subtle. I made the camera dollies back and forth ever so slowly. It is not immediately visible, but it does change the way you feel when looking at the scene, adding sense of a vast space because the slight perspective shift makes the depth of the image visible.
Lighting setup
This scene has a simple shadow and reflection setup for compositing the characters into the scene. The scene has 3 textures: normal, shadow pass and reflection mask. If you want to read more about how the reflections work head on over to AI Assisted Gamedev: Adding reflections!
The city hall interior will be the next location I will tackle. It will have multiple rooms with multiple characters. This means that it will be a massive undertaking, even with the help of AI!
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