Introductions

Welcome to my first ever blog… and Post!

For a computing student you’d think I’d be well up on this sort of thing but I never managed to get around to it. I have however had the pleasure to read some extremely useful and interesting Blogs by fellow games developers and I have wanted to add to the pool for a while now so here it goes!

Who is this unknown person?

I’m currently in my 4th and final year of study in Games Development at the Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. As part of my Advanced 3D concepts module my lecturer Michael Connelly asked us all to set up a blog to show our project work. Being a budding socialite I of course was thrilled with this idea… However! This is actually a really good idea and a smart way for him to drag the remainder of us shy folk out of our shells before we are unleashed onto the world in a months’ time.

I am team lead, AI Programmer and Level Designer for my final year project team. Our game is called Haven and it is a VR therapy game designed to gauge emotional and empathetic responses in children from and 8+. We decided to go with PolyArt style graphics and a fun friendly color pallet.

A few screen shots of the Project, we are currently working towards our Alpha Build.

And what are you doing here?

Our game is designed for play with the Oculus Rift; this means that when it is displaying the game for the player it must render the entire scene twice, once for each camera. We are all doing our part to optimize this process and it is what I was considering when choosing my project. I decided I would look into texture atlases which if used would allow for batching of draw calls in our game, improving rendering efficiency.

For me this meant taking the models produced by Conor Pendlebury (the team’s environmental modeler) and unwrapping, texturing, and combining them into a larger texture atlas. I predicted that a small game like ours could use a single texture atlas for all the assets in the level. Loading this into Unity and applying it to our models will allow is to save a significant amount of draw calls through batching at runtime.

Ok I’m listening…

I will be splitting my procedure for doing this into at least 3 posts showing my approach;

1. Unwrapping and Texturing
2. Creating a Texture Atlas & Manual UV Remapping
3. Achieving Batching in Unity

I must state that I by no means am saying mine is the best or most correct way of doing this, it is simply an approach to be taken or left in part or in whole. Who knows might help someone with some little problem they are having!