I spent quite a bit of time building the Arth Starport model in 3D Studio Max. It was a lot of fun. It was not hard to do at all – after all it’s just a bit of architecture and I’ve always been good at architectural modeling in Max. My primary goal was to make the station very recognizable. I eye-dropped the colors straight from the screen capture, and made the dimensions of the starport itself very similar. One thing I noticed about the starport in the original game, is that it was drawn quite incorrectly from a 3D perspective point of view. That made it a bit challenging to re-make, but I think I managed to do a decent job.

There are only two texture maps on the starport – the first one is the Arth logo which appears on one of the light gray outside panels, and the blue 6 pointed star that appears on the floor.  I made both of these in Illustrator.

OK, I seem to have encountered my first real Unity bug. Take a look at the two screen shots below.

The only difference between the two is that for the one on the left it was taken while the game was running inside the Unity editor, and for the second one it was taken from the Build & Run executable. That’s it. So tell me… why is the shading of the big planet completely jacked in the second screen shot? It looks like one of the axis of the normal map is inverted, turning my beautiful craters into ugly mounds. Why? WHY? WHYYYYY??!!!

No seriously, if you know why, please tell me.

The Starflight intro has pretty much been completely remade. Here are some before and after videos. Love it? Hate it?