Creating Game Environments in Maya and Photoshop with Adam Crespi

This course is a practical guide to constructing 3D buildings that can be used to populate video game environments. Author Adam Crespi starts with a gas station taken from a photograph—retrieving measurements and dimensions with modular blocking and planning techniques in Adobe Photoshop—and then re-creates the building in Maya with polygonal modeling and advanced texturing techniques. The course shows how to model elements such as walls, doors, and roofs, including stacking UVs on a texture sheet, and also sheds light on simulating real-world details like dirt, wear, and grime, using ambient occlusion and normal baking in a high- to low-poly workflow. The final chapter shows how to export the model to the Unity gaming engine for final cleanup and rendering.

Topics include:
- Analyzing concept art for contours, texture, and shadow detail
- Blocking out the basic form of a building
- Modeling modular elements
- Planning for occlusion and texture stacking
- Creating the low-poly-count elements
- Planning a texture sheet
- Stacking UVs
- Transferring maps
- Baking occlusion and normal maps
- Drawing detail at the right size
- Painting layers of dirt and wear
- Adding lights and refining materials