Chalmun's Mos Eisley Spaceport Cantina
The Mos Eisley Cantina started as an excuse to tear into 3DS Max., and eventually Unity. I am a huge Star Wars fan and relished the opportunity to work on an iconic place like this. I started by collecting as many floor plans and references that i could get my hands on. Surprisingly the actual building...or what's left of it...is still standing in Tanzania where the original film was shot.
Thats enough for technical details. I also spent tons of time watching the actual scene from the movie and collected visual reference for lighting, texturing and overall atmosphere of the environment
Now it was time to get down to business. Because I had such detailed floor plans it was easy to sketch out a floor plan for the building fairly quickly. The bar and the distillery fell into place right afterward.
Quick note: There are no bar stools in the scene. Actually after watching it over and over again the asset list boiled down to: cups, walls, distillery pieces, droid detector, short booth tables, small cushion seats, and the bar itself. The scene is largely populated with characters and creatures.
Here is a shot of the final modeling product, minus some clutter items. I decided later to add various cups, bowls of random food, smoking devices, and a plate of alien food resembling the food they eat at the beginning of Titan AE. Most sci-fi food seems to be goop that resembles either vomit or curry, sometimes both, so it was a fun alternative.
Because the texture restriction was so tight some of the details on models were just left in as semi-high poly models to avoid the need for a normal map. Here are most of the detail assets contained within the scene.
The main restrictions on this project were a texture budget of 1024x1024. A lot of the material work is done with masks stacked in separate RGB channels and overlapping tiling textures. In the case of glass int he scene they are 3 channel vector colors with transparencies and lights. The large square is the main wall texture. It was the most stretched of the textures, figuratively, so it needed the most space. Not depicted are spec maps hidden in the alpha channels of some of these.
After the goal was met I wanted to add a little more fan boy and detail to the scene using some decals. Below are the Mandalorian symbol, a bar menu written in the Star Wars universe font, a blaster mark, the bloodstain from Obi Wan's fight in the bar, some bar scuffing, and some cup rings.
These are 3 of the final shots taken out of Unity. I used the ShaderForge package to create the materials and the DecalSystem package for well...the decals.
Challenges
There were quite a few technical challenges with this scene...
The first being the texture budget. With a tight restriction i had to sacrifice normal maps first and foremost as well as a lot of unique textures. This meant UV'ing every piece with tiling textures in mind. It also meant a lot of tricks with the material creation suite to alter colors, distort maps, and pack as many different maps into as many different channels as possible.
The second major challenge was Unity itself. This was my first time using the Unity game engine. I had to experiment with import pipelines and find out all the little quirks of the system. I found out the hard way that the reimport mesh feature just does not work, regardless of file format. The second major hurdle with unity was the lighting engine. It is beyond awful. You can put a point light over a flat surface, which should radiate in all directions, and the floor will be half lit, half dark, even after a max settings bake. The one thing this project could have benefited from most was a 3rd party lighting package.
The first being the texture budget. With a tight restriction i had to sacrifice normal maps first and foremost as well as a lot of unique textures. This meant UV'ing every piece with tiling textures in mind. It also meant a lot of tricks with the material creation suite to alter colors, distort maps, and pack as many different maps into as many different channels as possible.
The second major challenge was Unity itself. This was my first time using the Unity game engine. I had to experiment with import pipelines and find out all the little quirks of the system. I found out the hard way that the reimport mesh feature just does not work, regardless of file format. The second major hurdle with unity was the lighting engine. It is beyond awful. You can put a point light over a flat surface, which should radiate in all directions, and the floor will be half lit, half dark, even after a max settings bake. The one thing this project could have benefited from most was a 3rd party lighting package.