Peter Han

The valley of snow (although there is no snow in the actual environment) is a practice piece made to examine the functionality of Unity engine. The environment design is inspired by the game Black Myth Wukong. I have not gone through all of the gameplay of the game until now, yet I am fascinated with its game art in those snowy scenes that I saw on online trailers. 

To make the environment generally more immersive, I add the depth of field effect to the camera. However, one limitation of such an approach is that real human eyes have the ability to automatically adjust the focus length and focus distance, which isn’t included in the effect. This causes the view to be either myopic or presbyopic. Another effect I added to the camera is the ambient occlusion. This reinforces the form and depth changes in the environment.  

Most of the assets in the scene are modified compared to the original version downloaded online. To keep the mesh in a consistent polygon level, I first remeshed the original mesh into a lower precision level, then applied smart uv projection, and eventually baked the texture. The eventual performance is good. One of the assets I found especially hard to deal with was the Chinese building. It has an extremely high mesh number, and two uv tiles for its texture. This causes quite a bit of trouble in the bake stage.

Finally, I want to say that unity is actually better than I thought. Despite its paucity in some of the PBR channels, it’s still a very convenient tool to use. Perhaps I will learn C# one day to fulfill my dream of auto depth of field in unity