Using Blender Materials.
Dev Diary #23
This week, I finally began to make and add materials and lighting to the Blender scene! As a group we decided to keep the colour pallete simple and to make the environment less distracting, use minimal texture maps. Looking back at Pinterest for further inspiration, I decided to stick to warmer colours such as different shades of brown for the furniture and contrast it with some cooler colours such as greens and blues for the walls and smaller details. For some of the objects such as windows, glasses and bubble tea cups, I used a white semi-transparent material to simulate glass or plastic to make it slightly more realistic/ credible. One issue I had with the materials in Blender though, is that I couldn't figure out how to give certian objects multiple colours e.g. the buttons on the coffee machine being silver when the rest of the machine is red. To fix this, I went online and found out that you have to select all the faces you want in a different colour, choose the material you want and then most importantly, click 'assign' under the material list in the material tab.
In addition to using simple coloured Blender materials, I made a simple wooden floor texture in Clip Studio Paint for the floor as I felt it looked too plain and could do with a bit of extra detail to it to make it seem more real and fill up the blank areas of the scene better.
As well as adding materials to the scene, I also added some lighting and lamps! These immidiately added more ambience to the cafe and made it feel more realistic and lived-in. Now that most of the items are modeled and have materials, I think they are mostly ready to be exported for our game! One of the programmers (Ashley) says that I should export the scene as a whole and it will be implemented into Unity as it currently is. Whilst it's not industry practice and each item should preferably be exported seperately, it does make it easier for me and does mean the scene is kept exactly as I planned and created it. This is especially useful as a lot of the earlier modelling that went into this scene was done careful to ensure the scale is correct to the player height and that there is enough space for the player to move around.
