Prop Process—details about my modeling, AO bake, and texture process

Characters—my rough pipeline of modeling and setting up characters

Effects—examples and detailed explanations of various effects

Shader features —a few ways I optimized my shader workflow

First I’ll block out a basic form with primitives. Then I’ll use the bridge tool to connect shapes or quad draw to make a whole new topology. If I have a similar asset I’ll start with that instead of building from primitives first.

Once I’m close to finished with the model, I’ll layout UVs by doing planar map on different parts of the mesh, using the unfold tool to get things in shape, then sometimes stitching parts back together. Then I arrange and scale the separate UV islands to give more visible areas the most detail.

I have a custom toolbar in Maya that’s pretty basic, but helps a lot since I don’t use the right-click context menu much. There’s a bunch of primitives, extrude, combine, bevel, add edge loop, cut face, extract, merge, separate, freeze transform, delete non-deform history, and export selected.

Next step is baking Ambient Occlusion which I do using Mental Ray. Make sure you have that installed, enable the mayatomr.dll plugin, assign a surface shader, assign a new lighting texture, then bake selected. My settings are all default, except the fill texture seams option is cranked up.

I should also mention my base textures for authoring are tiny by modern standards, only 512px for most props and 1024px for everything else.

Everything 2D is done in Photoshop. For this project I exported everything as PNGs to avoid the repo getting huge, but I may switch to just keeping PSDs in the project in the future to avoid lost work.

I set the AO layer to multiply so it shadows over whatever colors I tweak. Then in another layer I paint solid colors or gradients. If the prop demands texture then I’ll grab something from Textures.com and probably lower the opacity and saturation before drawing over it to add details.

If the texture needs to be seamless I’ll use Photoshop’s Offset tool to show where to mirror the texture. I’m not a great digital painter, so I mostly use the default brush with varied hardness settings.

I didn’t bother keeping Maya scenes up to date and instead opted to work from FBXs. I made this switch because I was forgetting so often to sync the files, but sometimes had to redo work after accidentally baking out frames.

I don’t use any custom rigging plugins, none of my rigs have controls, and I just do my best with rotating bones and then let PhysX take the wheel. The animations in Sausage don’t require much nuance, so it would take more time than it was worth for the few short animations I author per rig.

There’s three rigs all the characters share: Dog, Bird and Horse. They have the same number and positioning of neck joints so the characters all feel mostly the same. I only animate body joints, so that Unity’s animator doesn’t override PhysX’s effecting of joints along each character’s neck.

Each character has its’ own prefab where I set up the scripts a character needs to move and wiggle. I also set up each character’s hats individually in Unity to get the best fit. A big time saver here was having a separate prefab payload with physics states, triggers for kicks and interactions, and other stuff that all characters need that gets spawned in at run-time.

I pass the world position of each vert to the fragment program

Add top and bottom color shader properties to interpolate between

In fragment function, interpolate between bottom and top with worldPos.y