My journey becoming a Unity game developer: Make a game look beautiful-Scifi Control Room Walls

Objective: Create 2 walls that will serve to design the Control Room. Also, we will add variations to these walls to keep them from being redundant.

Wall_02 prefab created to be different from Wall_01 prefab.

The 1st wall we will create will be sort of like a gradient. That means the bottom part of the wall will be light, then above that dark, then light in the middle, then dark again and light again on the top. The reason for the height at the top and bottom is to see the height of the wall. The darker appearance in the middle is to show depth with the wall. The little bit of light in the middle of the dark is a way to see the depth in the darkness.

We’re going to start with actually a floor game object being used as a wall. Rotate the floor object to be upright, and create an Empty game object name Wall_01. Reset the Transform of Wall_01, the drag the floor game object into the Wall_01 object making it a child object.

Using a floor asset to create the bottom portion of the wall.

Duplicate that floor asset and move it up high enough to represent the top area of the wall. To add a little variation between the same 2 floor objects used, rotate the top floor object on the Z-axis to make the design of the floors appear to be different in orientation.

Duplicating the floor asset and placing at the top portion of the wall.

Now we’re going to add dark floors to represent the middle portion of the wall. Drag Scifi Floors_02 into the bottom Scifi Floors_03 object to attach itself to that position. Unparent Scifi Floors_02, then CTRL-drag the floor object above and connect to Scifi Floors_03. Duplicate Scifi Floors_02, and CTRL-drag it above and connect to the bottom part of the upper wall object.

Added dark floors to be the middle portion of the wall.

To show the depth of the dark walls, we will add a light floor object in between the 2 dark floor objects which will be Scifi Floors_07.

Added a small light floor asset to place in between the dark floors of the wall.

Take this wall and turn it into a prefab. In the Prefabs folder, create another folder name Walls which will hold all of our completed wall objects. Drag Wall_01 game object into the Walls folder to make it into a prefab.

Turned the Wall_01 object into a prefab.

We’re going to use the same Wall_01 prefab to make another wall prefab that will be different from Wall_01 prefab. To do this we must Unpack the Wall_01 instance prefab in the Hierarchy. Right-click on Wall_01 object, then select Prefab->Unpack which will turn Wall_01 instance object back into a regular game object. This process will not change the Wall_01 prefab game object in our Prefabs folder, instead just allow us to change the unpacked prefab instance in the Hierarchy itself. Next, change the name of the unpacked prefab instance Wall_01 to Wall_02 as this will make this wall an independent game object from Wall_01.

Unpacked the Wall_01 instance prefab.

With Wall_02 we will add variation to it so it doesn’t look like Wall_01. Let’s change the top and bottom light floors with Scifi Floors_04 by dragging this floor into the two Scifi Floors_03 to access their positions. Unparent the 2 Scifi Floors_04 objects from Scifi Floors_03, and delete the two Scifi Floors_03 objects as we don’t need them anymore. With the 2 light floors, we’re going to rotate them to have the painted lines parallel to each other with the bottom line towards the bottom and the top line towards the top.

Added variation by changing out the light floors objects with another type.

We’re going to change out the dark floors, but before we do that we want to add Wall_01 prefab back into the scene. We want Wall_01 to be side by side with Wall_02 to see the differences.

Wall_01 prefab joined with Wall_02.

Let’s change out the dark floors with Scifi Floors_01 as this will add variation from Wall_01 dark floor patterns. Just take Scifi Floors_01 and make it a child of Scifi Floors_02, then unparent them and delete Scifi Floors_02. Now we will see the difference between the 2 dark floor Wall objects.

Changed dark floors on Wall_02 for variation.

Let’s give a different variation to the center light floor object by adding Scifi Floors_11 to it. Unparent Scifi Floors_11 from Scifi Floors_07 middle light floor, and move Scifi Floors_11 to make it protrude from the center of Scifi Floors_07. Also, we’re going to rotate Scifi Floors_07 to have the single thin black stripe above the large black stripe.

Using another floor asset to give variation to the center piece of Wall_02.

We’re going to give the bottom floor object variation by adding Scifi Floors_10 to it. Unparent it from the bottom Scifi Floors_04 object, then make it protrude from the floor object and move it up slightly to place it above the black line.

Using another floor asset to give variation to the bottom piece of Wall_02.

One last thing we want to do with Wall_02 to add variation from Wall_01 to it is give it borders. Use Scifi Floors_12 object and place it over the seams connecting the 2 Walls. Scale it to fit the height of the floor object, and bring the width down to make it more narrow as we don’t want it to look to thick in the scene.

Using another floor asset to create a border between the 2 walls.

Duplicate Scifi Floors_12 object, drag it over to the other side and place it on the edge of the floor object. Rotate the Scifi Floors_12 objects to have the thin painted lines facing inward and the thick black line facing outward. Select both Scifi Floors_12 objects and CTRL-drag them up to the top Scifi Floors_04 floor object to place them around the object.

Duplicated borders and placed them in the middle of the 2 walls and outside of Wall_02.

Finally, drag the new Wall_02 game object into the Prefabs folder to make this a new Wall_02 prefab object. We now have 2 prefab walls to use for variety in making the Control Room.

Wall_02 turned into a prefab.