I decided to do something different rather than just a screenshot and a bit of info, so I’ll show you how I made it!

Let me just post a few quick notes about the video though.

It’s a sped-up video of me developing the Tirpitz battleship. There are a few issues and bits missing in the video which I’ll quickly mention. The modeling wasn’t shown as I figured I’d probably make too many mistakes and it’d just get pointless to watch in the 20x speed version anyway. The title for some reason cut out and I’m guessing the music doesn’t really suit it, but at least it isn’t copyright protected. Some of the assets I used I had already designed previously for other units, as you can see me comparing it to another ship (the Scharnhorst) which I’m copying bits off as I go (which I designed so I’m stealing from myself here). Lastly my graphics card driver killed itself from the recording program as well as my hard drive fatally struggling to write a constant stream of 1920×1200 to the disk (whoops!)

The actual development progress for a unit, depending on it being a boat or a plane goes somewhat differently but not by much, here’s the steps I take to design a boat.  I design the model in SketchUp and texture it there. For some reason it’s the only program I’m comfortable in modelling. I export it to 3DS Max for further refinement, such as optimization and assigning mesh groups as well as texture baking. A ‘detail’ texture is then applied to apply a level of realism to the textures without having to create a separate ‘detail’ shader in the editor, where instead I use a specular shader to create a shine effect on the surface of the ship. The boat is imported and textured and the necessary components of each part are added, as well as the individual scripts. After I link everything it’s pretty much done, Unity does the rest!