Pagoda

The center piece of the Asian area is the miniature pagoda (a Hindu or Buddhist temple, typically in the form of a many-tiered tower) These are often the statement piece within Japanese water gardens and also gave opportunity within the project for the puzzle aspect, this puzzle required the player to find and pick up a key.

Using concept sketches created previously, the development of the model took place using Maya to build the model itself. This process began by creating the basic supports on which the roof will be situated on, followed by the addition of the roof.

Textures and normal maps were then created in Photoshop – as illustrated below on the base. (A normal map is an image that stores a direction at each pixel, the red, green, and blue channels of the image are used to control the direction of each pixel’s normal. This process is used to fake high-resolution details on a low-resolution model. Each pixel of the map stores the surface slope of the original high-res mesh at that point. This creates the illusion of more surface detail or better curvature.)