Hello fellow cleaners, hope you’re having fun playing Project Shoreline!

I’m here to talk a little about 3D graphics, particularly for the environment  – but also to introduce myself. Hi! My name is Veronica, and I joined Speldosa in February, as a 3D/Tech Artist. I basically started working on Project Shoreline as soon as I joined, so it’s been intense from the get-go!

Getting down to business

The team had a solid idea for the project, now it was time to build it! My focus was, to start, just putting the little world of Shoreline together in Unity. That means: making the terrain, modeling and placing (a lot of) rocks, and putting together the Cluster areas. I had pretty free reins, especially during the earlier iterations of the scene. Considering the fairly short time we had to create Project Shoreline, there are things that I feel would have needed some more planning regarding the layout, but it has been nice to just try things out and see where we can take it!

3D Rocks and Platforms from Project Shoreline

Terrain, with a lot of rocks!

Pond Cluster

Optimizing

The initial mindset for making the 3D assets, given that we are still trying to figure out exactly how things are supposed to look, was to make nice-looking assets without thinking too much about optimizing. This left us with a lot of high poly assets (I’m talking 20-50k or more tris) for several environment props. Now, high poly and low poly are fairly vague terms, and what decides what is too high or too low at the end of the day is the context in which the assets are used. While a character model very well can be 20k, environmental props that are used several times in a scene should try to stay on a much lower number. Other things that can affect how high poly the assets should be, can be the scale of the asset, how detailed it should be, and what type of hardware you’re aiming for. That being said, when the release date started getting closer, I had to do a lot of reducing to help improve the fps (frames per second). I believe the programmers were satisfied with my work 😉

This rock is used in a lot of places, and it looks perfectly fine with a much lower poly!

Flowers and Foliage

An important part of Project Shoreline is to show whoever is cleaning that they are making an impact, and we wanted their effort to be rewarded by showing that nature is healing – so we made a bunch of plants and flowers that grow or simply regain their beautiful colors when you finish cleaning certain areas. Here are some that were made by me, and some that were made by another skilled artist on our team, Tyler! Speaking of Tyler, they also made our lovely trees. Here’s a neat trick we use to get the stylized, “blended” look for foliage: change the direction of the face normals! For example, I made the grass and certain flowers have all their face normals point in Y=1 direction, while Tyler got the face normal directions from a sphere when making the tree canopy!

Some plants from Project Shoreline

Tyler’s trees

Going forward

We are constantly learning new things, and we are still researching how best to convert our amazing 2D concept art to achieve the 3D style we want, but I think we are well on our way! I think something I personally have to look into more in the future is textures, materials, and shaders, to be able to create the right feeling for the environment.