Was about time! ...for another cool sci-fi asset. Dlnk is releasing Colony Factory, an environment pack designed for building sci-fi structures & buildings. Interior, exterior and also top/down if you like it that way. Allows you to easy create your custom buildings with tons of modular grid snap prefabs. Check out Asset Store here!
Video recorded realtime using Unity 2018
Let's work!
Once I had a clear idea of what I wanted to design was time for design process. It took me a while to find cool references. Pinterest is a cool tool for that pre-concept. Then concept art took its part on the process.. but just a quick sketch. Not much time for wandering. The rest of the process was all modeling, textures, high poly, lowpoly, etc etc... and finally Unity! Not exactly that order but mixing among skills to check every stuff at Unity once designed. So.. some pics below, and remember.. if you like process, follow on Facebook ;)
Some work in progress shots.
Asset is ready!
This asset pack is quite easy to work with, anyway it is recommended to use it with a medium user level of unity. To avoid including unnecessary prefabs, there are only one unique version of every material set for each prefab so you can use the material library to customize each block of your building with other compatible materials or even customize them (change colors, emissive, detail, metalness, etc.) to create your own ones.
Gallery (unity realtime shots)
Demoscene is designed as example and test of this pack so if you doubt about how to use it just go to the scene and check out how it has been done. Yes, I think about tutorials, but each video will require many time (and you know what is said about that) so it doesn't depend on my interest wich I have, but the revenue from the store.
Meanwhile, as said, demoscene is full working with a simple character and function to change between Top/Down or 3rd person. You can also hide character and works mostly as a 1st person.
Mind Process
It's time to imagine
To imagine how our civilization will evolve in time, to design the future. It has been said that culture (books, movies or games) is the best way to take a sight at what the world could be in the next years. That's because we creators use our imagination to design and develop how we think the future could become while introducing ideas into human society. And that's a great time for science fiction though. New Star Wars and Star Trek movies, amazing series like ST: Discovery, Black Mirror, etc. And it's not so obvious for gamming but there is a trend too. For me personally, the last great game I've played with this theme was Death Space, previous to that.. I'd mention the great Mass Effect & ME2. Not saying there's no more, but that's enough reference to check how far could this genre go.
Unity is imrpoving...
In a necessary effort to rival with Unreal, Unity is trying to take developers to the next level. I understand that if you check most of the games released, there's a mayor trend to 2d games and very basic indie productions. While having a really powerful 3d engine what, most of the time, is not even required for that kind of projects. I guess, that's what they had in mind when they release that new "Snaps" prototyping environment asset. With kind intentions, Unity send many publishers info so we could release assets based in their "snaps" so it become easily replaceable. It sounds good to me, but then I checked the asset itself and was really messy (Look who's talking!). I sincerely hope that Unity project of making prototyping assets replaceable for other artworks available at Asset Store will improve and finally works, but for me, it was hard to make it fit this time.
Inception anyway.
Even when I found this "Snaps compatible" thing not really appealing yet, the main idea of a sci-fi facility was into my mind. Other futuristic environments I've done are mostly clean and simple, but allways loved the scratchy pannels, the machinery, and all that complicated and dirty stuff that could be in a Space Colony Factory.
