After some discussion with team members, it was decided that I should focus my attention on adding the ability to disembark from the ship onto planets.\u00a0 In order to do that, I need to build a few assets.\u00a0 The first and most important asset to build is the terrain vehicle (TV for short).\u00a0 Here are some pretty images of the build in process.\u00a0 I kind of glossed over how I made the body of the TV because I pretty much winged it and wasn’t entirely sure how it would come out.\u00a0 Basically, it started out as a sphere (the cockpit) which was then sliced, scaled, extruded, chamfered, extruded, chamfered, scaled (with soft selection), and so on… until finally, it looked halfway decent.<\/p>\n

Additionally, there is also a short video of how it looks inside Unity.\u00a0 I placed the TV in a posed position on a planet’s surface and made sure to scale everything so that it looks as close as possible to how it will actually look when playing the game.\u00a0 I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of detail on the surface of the planet – the camera is zoomed in quite a bit.\u00a0 There’s hardly maybe 50 actual texels on the whole screen; most of the detail actually comes from a tiled normal map combined with some on the fly fractals generated by my shaders.<\/p>\n

Anyway… exciting times!\u00a0 It won’t be long now before we’ll all be able to drive around on planets.\u00a0 Next up, I’ll need to build some assets for the mining part of the game.\u00a0 Piles of rocks and so on.\u00a0 And then there are the creatures that roam the surface… I have no idea how I’ll be making all of those.<\/p>\n<\/div>