Brain teaser

Early on the game, the player will enter in a level where there is a huge brain, with all kinds of devices attached to it. All these devices represent something, which I won't go into detail, because I want to spare some novelty for the actual game.

First thing to do is to get a brain model. I sure as hell won't start modelling one. So I need a free brain model, that is low-poly enough. Unfortunately I couldn't find one that I could use (tried to convert and whatnot, but for some reason I couldn't). That's when I ran into this. I downloaded the pial (in .obj), and then fired up Blender.

The number of faces is too large - it is in the realm of hundred thousands. Even if Unity would be able to handle this (it isn't, there is a hard cap at 65,536 faces), it would be too large for my game. What I did is to use the Decimate, Smooth and Triangulate modifiers. Decimate (planar, up to 20 degrees) did a good job at lowering the amount of faces, smooth made it look a bit better, and then triangulate fixed a problem in Unity, where some of the faces would not be rendered.

 

It contains about 10,000 faces. After that, I imported the model into a new scene, then I modeled a wire in blender, imported it as well, then added lights, materials, etc. This is the end result:

 

With the wires, I was aiming for a look like this (the game is called "That Dragon, Cancer"). However, this was just a quick mash-up to see the brain model in the game with a few effects, the end result will be a bit more polished, I hope.