I started off by using primitive shapes to map out my scene in Maya and then started work on my main corridor piece. In retrospect I became too consumed with the primary corridor piece that included an attached floor and archway ceiling. My focus on this aspect of the scene consumed my work time and I was extremely focused on making sure this piece fit together with the other simple objects I had made. In this sense I was not looking at the entire project as a sum of parts, and this failure at the start of my project would come back to bite me throughout the project. The corner ceiling was especially difficult to get right and I spent many hours focusing on just this part. I had the sense that I was just about to reach the top of the hill and once I completed this part the rest would fall into place. Ultimately, I should have worked on other pieces and props rather than being so dialed in on this one section. 

I initially wanted to have stairs the led down deeper into the tomb but saw early that this would become more difficult as I would know have to contend with many more pieces than I would need. I put together the primary 'entry room' fairly early as well as my sand dune floor. With my main rooms and corridor starting to come together I had gained a slow but productive enough start in blocking out my scene.

I started to run into more serious snags with the project in the second week. The same corridor turn piece was problematic and although I reached out for help and rethought how I should attempt to finish the piece it was still slow going. My entry room was neglected during the second and third weeks and sat in its block out stage for too long. At this point I was looking at the scope of my project and what I needed to drop to better fit into our project schedule. 

Map layout

As a result I simplified my walls and floors and also got started on my props and center piece, which thankfully went a lot more smoothly. I modeled two vases, a torch, a brazier and bowl, and finally a funeral pyre 'casket' relatively quickly. These pieces turned out really great and I was happy that I could get these pieces out of the way even when my corridor pieces were causing me problems. 

At this stage I desperately needed to start UVing whatever I had done. The props were the first go get the treatment and afterwards I finished my center piece and UVed it as well. The center piece is a marble treasure altar with a gold top, fit for any illustrious Pharaoh. 

Modular Pieces for the scene

At this stage we were in week 4 of the project and I still needed to finish modeling the corner pieces, my floaters, UV them all, and tie off some loose ends. I reached out for some more help on the corner piece and simplified it heavily and created a new modular ceiling piece that would fit with the corridor archway but extrude downward to reach the corner ceiling. With this matter sort of settled I needed to finish the floor piece for the corner. This caused another set of problems as I could not get it to match up properly with my other modular floors. However, I was able to fix the issue by snapping the faces properly to each other. 

Props for the scene

Next, I needed to prep my UV sets for texturing in painter. My props and center piece were set up first and I used the texel density from the center piece as the baseline for the rest of my pieces. The sets were going fairly quickly as many of the modular pieces were pretty straight forward and due to the nature of creating modular assets, I deleted faces that would not be seen. My trim pieces turned out pretty great and would be useful later on when needed to fill up slight gaps and seams that tend to only rear their heads once into Unity for rendering. At this stage I really was not hitting the progress points I needed to be at and made the decision that I would not be including floater on my pieces as they were causing problems when baking into painter. This was a really difficult decision to make because usually they are not particularly difficult to get right, however I needed to press on and get textures ready. 

I now had everything in Unity and it was time to arrange each piece according to my layout. Unfortunately, the corner piece that had plagued me since the beginning of the project did not fit properly once into Unity. I had to use a very flat ceiling piece instead that affected the rest of my layout and the archways I had spent so long on would not even be visible in my final scene. 

However moving onto lighting, animations, and particle effects in Unity I encountered a few snags but nothing detrimental. Lighting turned out to be relatively straightforward and once I removed the sky-box and darkened the scene completely I was actually really happy with how the entire corridor looked. It had the dark atmosphere I wanted and felt like it was deep underground in the desert. I mainly used low CCT lights to add an orange glow that worked well with my walls and pieces, especially the golden sections turned out nice. It gave me a little extra boost that the scene was turning out better than I expected.

I used one animation on my door which was a bit tricky at first because my door was jumping around to the wrong area of the scene when the animation played. I fixed this by creating a prefab and aligning the pivot points correctly. I found a surprisingly wistful free music track that worked really well for my scene. Finding audio for the door was a bit tricky and it was not as clean as the ambient sound track.

For the particle effect I knew for a while that I wanted to have some fire for my torches and that is what I made and they turned out pretty good. I was a bit unclear on adjusting the effect but they did end up working well for the scene especially in the entry room where the player spawns. 

Baking the light maps was slightly problematic and it took some troubleshooting with other students in the class to see that we needed to set the majority of our objects to 'static' before the light maps would show up properly in the assets folder.

Overhead view of the final scene rendered in unity

My 4 UV texture sets

Overall, this project was a challenge, but I did learn a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses as well as what it takes to make modular assets. Going forward I need to just get a better start and not be afraid to fail and move on. The corner piece that caused so many issues is not even very noticeable, and it took way from other aspects of my project. I found that my UV skills are still solid and that using vertex ID is incredibly quick and effective.

I’m happy how the scene turned out and really enjoyed setting up the Unity scene and playing around with the lights and audio.

Final screenshots and video walkthrough