Vineyard Valley [Jam City 2019 - Present]
The challenge for this project was the short development cycle, 3 months to Soft Launch with 40 days of game-play, and being the team's first game in Unity. Because of this we went with an art style that was established and can be easily produced, but appealing nonetheless, with lighting being the key art element to set us apart from the competition.
Environments
Each room is made up from individual furniture assets, each one with multiple style variations.
Lighting
Even though we were using Unity this time, we wanted all the art to be created in Maya, including shaders and baked lighting. This ensured a faster feedback loop, and provided animation and marketing with finished art work to work with.
To speed up the lighting process I came up with a tool to manage render sets and automate the PSD creation. The tool allowed artists to create their lighting in passes that can be easily tweaked in photoshop and bake everything overnight . The different passes also allowed specific shadows to be removed from the lightmaps and added back as a transparency planes.
Environment visualizing scripts
Maya scripts (Python) that I wrote to help artists handle the large amount of assets.