Task: Create a 3d background and use it as a transition to a new bonus scene.
This is the near final effect in a work in progress game. This game is not released and is not final. I did not create any of the actual art, but I did create all of the effects and the vast majority of the animation seen here.
This is the scene I was given to create the transition. Again, I did not create this geometry, I did however import it and set it up.
Here I took what I was given and duplicated it a few times then duplicated the floor plane to use as walls and added a few other small details. To save on some processing, at this point, I could have set up LODs, and in the future I may still do that. But, so far during testing everything seems to be running fine. I am very much of the opinion as a tech artist, that optimization should take a back seat to visual quality. I try to approach things with future optimization and best practices in mind, but prefer to go all out and then scale back instead of starting with lower quality. Ideally the hardware you are targeting has been properly profiled and you can set budgets but sometimes you just gotta see how it runs.
Now to immediately contradict that previous statement.
There was a request from the art director to fill the mineshaft with gold and diamonds. At first the artist was planning on making 3d geometry for each and every nugget and diamond. Which undeniably would've been a better looking end result... However, he wanted a lot. I have seen what that much geometry can do to a framerate. So I asked to instead make me a sprite sheet that I could create billboards with.
The results aren't perfect, but they aren't bad. Future iteration may bring in some 3d stuff to help sell the look. But using billboards is a pretty big performance saver, considering it's all done with a single texture that is gpu instanced. And now there are resource that can be used on post processing and lighting instead.
Speaking of lighting. I lit the scene with several point lights and a directional light. The point lights are all baked. The directional light is animated so it's running in real time.
This is just the light map. I used Unity's built in tools to bake the lights.
After that it's just a matter of animating the camera movement, light colors, and blending between two post processing volumes to adjust the mood as you pass through the tunnel and Bob's your uncle. Oh, it might be important to note that I am used camera stacking to separate the background from the actual game UI.