Level Art Polish - Melody

After implementing all of the districts(housing, downtown, and park) respective models, I have been working on polishing our level art and worldbuilding. Some of the changes I've made include adding a  floor and animations. I've also had to troubleshoot some minor world bugs like shadow distance, elevation discrepancies, and  floor tile holes. 

Originally, I had a terrain tile in place throughout the level, but that was uneven and not practical for buildings and the roads. Hence I changed the floor tiles to be flat to match the roads. This was a slightly painful process as making sure there were no holes in the tiles and no overlapping areas to prevent z-fighting  proved to be quite tedious. Because I still wanted to leave some terrain tiles, they had to be lower on the y axis so that they wouldn't z-fight with the flat ground tiles. To balance this change in elevation, I added cornered tiles to provide a smooth declination to bridge both of the elevations. On the topic of elevation, I also made sure that all of the buildings and models were not in the ground or floating in the air as can be seen with the trees in the screenshots. 

Furthermore, based on feedback we received, the world felt too static and boring. To counter this, I added animations created in Maya (which I learned how to do in another class) for the park fair attractions. This paired with 3D sound and moving NPC's really makes the city feel alive. Lastly, some of our other playtest feedback indicated that the shadow visibility distance was too small to I also adjusted that accordingly so that shadows don't just appear as the player gets closer to them.