It’s all hard surface right? So all we need is the silhouette and tileable materials! The first iteration was going through each piece and using Maya’s Polyreduce or Max’s ProOptimizer to get it to a more manageable size. Then we combined and condensed as many materials as possible based on color and type. We created a few tileable base materials out of what came with the original model. Exported into unity, set it all up, and did a quick and dirty light bake. The initial results were promising. We had a version of it running in VR. From far away it looked great. However, we wanted to move along the ISS up close and personal.

Unfortunately, it looked far less impressive upon closer inspection. The auto-reduction process has messed up smoothing, light baking errors, as well as pieces of geometry that naturally got completely screwed up with the process. It got us in VR sooner than we thought and was enough for our programmers to start working with it. It overall looked very unpolished and we were missing that “lived in” feel that we knew we had to accomplish. The level of quality was definitely not acceptable to ship with, so we started the task of doing every piece the right way with no automated functions (for the most part).

Obviously we could have taken this much further and cleaned up any issues we found, but it almost seemed like working in the wrong direction, especially since we had such a strong clean model to begin with.