Today I tied up some loose ends on my 2D Space Shooter Pro game and then decided to go ahead and start on the Stealth Game & Cinematography course. Given that we only have a week left of this program, I wanted to make sure I had contacts readily available for help if I so needed it.
In the first lesson I completed, entitled Environment & Lighting, I learned how to assign materials to blank structural objects and manipulate their perceived surfaces. I made new materials, utilized the Unity Asset Store to find patterns (we’re using a lot of marble) and then manipulated those surfaces to represent real-life textures.
For example, when placing the dark marble pattern on this pillar, we visually shrunk the size of the marble pattern by increasing the number of tiles. We also changed the “metallic” and “roughness” properties using a slider in the Shader component. The metallic slider controls the amount of reflected light and can make a surface look more or less metallic while the roughness slider controls how scattered the (perceived) reflected light is, the more scattered looking rougher and more unified light refection looking smoother.
We also were able to simulate the looks of windows. I learned how to make a material opaque to translucent and all the way to transparent using the opacity slider in the color picker.
One thing I would like to note is the vastness of the Unity Asset Store. It’s an absolutely *huge* library of textures and objects and finishes to choose from. So much so that it seems even a beginner can get a pretty sophisticated looking game going. And that’s exciting!
