Quickly Creating & Selling Furniture for Unity Games

Introduction

My name is Guillermo Campos and I’m from Mexico. 3 years ago, I started a small company with 2 friends focused on virtual tours to sell buildings, with 360 renders, VR experiences and AR apps to show buildings distributions. Most of the work can be found here.

Sinespace

I discovered Sinespace thanks to Adam Frisby who told me about the platform and asked me if I was interested in updating the models I had in the Unity asset store. I tried out the platform and really liked it! It helps developers to share their creations in a virtual space where they can interact in a different way with 3D objects.

Creating Furniture

First of all, I think of a bigger goal of a project. I usually give my assets a reason to be – they are not just simple models to sell and are usually re-used in my personal projects.

Let’s take some customizable furniture as an example. I wanted to make a set that had every necessary piece of furniture to build a house and would not have any impact on the performance. The performance aspect was very important as this way the models could be used anywhere on any platform. I decided to use the minimum textures possible and color every single asset with them, that’s why I created an atlas that contained wood, plastic, metal, and marble, and exported every object with different UV mapping (I wrote a code in Maya to quickly export the model, move the UVs, then export again in a cycle that would take every possible option in the atlas). There were a few more materials: one semitransparent material, one cutout material, plus one more which had some additional textures needed. Using this way, the models are faster to create and they hold the same style and detail. When I create a new model similar to a previous one, I usually just modify the last model and rearrange UVs to fit well. All the models, in this case, were made from the outside and the inside so they could be “opened”.

I was aware that I wouldn’t be able to create too many models (I needed 600 different models) in a short amount of time if I had to detail every single model, that’s why I focused mainly on having the same style and utilizing bigger solutions.

Every time, my reference would only be an image of a piece of furniture found on the web, just a plain 2D image, no ortho views, no measures, just one image. To get the proportional scale right, I downloaded a human model from the web, scaled it to 1.70m, and made all my assets according to it (if I modeled a chair, I would stand next to a chair and see what’s the normal height of it comparing to my height). This is the best tip I can give to anyone creating a video game: make sure to use your main character as a reference when modeling objects.

I was later asked to add the models in Sinespace, and guys form Sine Wave helped me upload the models to the game. I believe is a great platform and hopefully, I will be able to create some more assets for it when I have free time.

How to upload such items as furniture to Sinespace:

You can upload items as furniture items to place in room templates with the ‘Edit Room’ button. These furniture items can be dragged from your inventory and placed in your room. The items don’t necessarily have to be furniture such as chairs, they can be game items, a presentation tool or pieces of a structure which users can use to build a larger item (e.g pieces of a race track).

If you want to make the furniture item sittable, you will need to add the SeatImproved component to an empty child object and parent it to the furniture. Here is a tutorial on how to do that.

Read about how to attach the furniture component here.

QUESTIONS? JOIN SINESPACE’S OFFICIAL DISCORD SERVER.

Textures

In the case of furniture for Sinespace, I mainly used single materials with 4 textures (Diffuse, Normal, Metallic/ Smoothness, Emission) in Photoshop, and assigned the material I needed in the UV mapping. I made this to reduce the time spent on creating textures for each model and focus on creating a big chunk of models. It’s a quick approach that allows to fully focus on modeling and not worry about texturing.

But! For very realistic models, I HIGHLY recommend using Substance Painter and ZBrush. My approach was possible because I reused the same set of textures over and over, but this approach won’t give you such details as wrinkles, dirt, aging, etc. You will always have the same details for every object which, in some cases, may not be what you want. Here’s a tutorial for Substance Painter I followed:

There’s also a nice tutorial from Vincent Gault on Substance in Sinespace:

Afterword

Basically, this project helped me grow a lot and learn how to take better decisions. If you plan on selling assets on the asset store, always focus on providing a full solution to the needs of the customer, and you will be able to sell anything!

Guillermo Campos, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Daria Loginova

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