Group Project Evaluation

 13/05/21 - Week 32

This project was quite a fun one but challenging at times. I have learnt a lot this project though which is a really good thing, I've expanded my unreal knowledge greatly and I feel like this will be useful for me in the future. On top of this, I haven't done this sort of style before and it was fun and interesting to experiment with stylisation in my texturing and modelling.

Working with a group was fun too as we had lots of ideas and were able to bounce them off of each other and I think our initial concept was really cool. Communication definitely became slower at the end so it made it a little harder to figure out where everyone was in the project and what style people were going for in terms of foliage and textures, this was definitely something that our group needed to improve on.

Starting with the design, as a group we wanted to try quite hard to match the style and colour palette of our levels which I think we have resulted in somewhat well though it is a bit hard to judge since others have not gotten too far into texturing yet. I tried to keep everything very low poly initially which ended up slowing me down as I had to go back and add some more polys on some models since I found out that it is actually textures and VFX that slow the engine down instead of poly amount - to an extent of course. I also feel like I improved my modelling a bit more since I tried to use multiple meshes for one item instead of habitually using just one which ended up making unwrapping and baking much easier and looking a lot better. Not initially doing this also slowed me down in the modelling process too. 

I stuck to my original concept quite strictly and I'm glad I did as I think the finished design of this project is probably one of my best environments. There's lots of small things which did push me for time but I am glad they are all there as it makes the level feel lived in and interesting to look around - which is what I wanted.

Texturing for this project was a learning experience and at first it was rather slow as I didn't really understand how to make objects stylised. I then began to learn that the majority of it was through not using microdetail and having heavily highlighted edges. I then would add some damage on top of this to show some wear and also some colour variation which was also new to me. I think the textures in this project is something that I'm really pleased with. Not only are the designer textures much more detailed and unique to what I have been able to achieve before, but also the painter textures look nice with the stylised features, I also spent a lot of time on them to get it right.

I also learnt how to do decals which I previously thought would be difficult, and though I don't think mine are the best I think it adds a lot more variation and depth to the scene. I tried to take more time with this project and get a better level of polish which has really made my work look more up to the standard that I would like to have seen in my previous projects. There are of course still places I could improve and still things for me to learn to speed up my texturing process. I think if we are talking in a stylised sense, I realised that the zbrush sculpted elements of the piece responded to the stylised textures much better than a lot of the regular models. I think if I were to approach a stylised piece again I would try to sculpt more to get the nuances in the edges.

Lighting in unreal was something I was really eager to improve on as I constantly felt that I was behind in learning how to light - I just didn't understand it. Through a lot of tutorials and a lot of project settings tweaking I finally created a lighting that I was happy with. Lighting is still an area that I want to improve in. To me, this scene is overly lit and I wanted more of an emphasis on the hanging lights rather than purely from the main window but I couldn't find the right balance and just ended up with the result I have, which I find is still warm and welcoming, yet serene which is what I wanted to portray. Some of the other things that strike out to me as a place that I wanted to improve was the hanging lights not appearing to be lit from the inside, my emissive were a bit strange this whole project and I am unsure as to why, so I have ended up with dark lampshades. On top of this, I did want the window to have the metallic parts show in the shadow, but I realise this would have probably only been possible through the use of modelling.

Overall, I improved a lot with my lighting but the combination of trying to work things out on my own and also my render times being extraordinarily long limited me in this project.

The foliage in this level is still something I am a bit hesitant about. I do like it, but I know it could have been improved by using zbrush to model it which would have created a more professional and polished foliage piece. I wanted the foliage to blend into the scene but I feel in some places it sticks out like a sore thumb, especially the ivy. I think this just genuinely needed more thought into it.

I do really like how I have added the effects to the foliage though and this helped it to blend more with the scene and also add a lot of movement and dynamics to it. I learnt a lot from adding these effects, though they were simple and it gave me a bit of an introduction to how to edit materials in the material editor.

As for the particle system I added, I had already known how to use this feature from the backyard project so this didn't end up being too difficult. I did run into some issues with emissives, as previously mentioned, and this meant that I was unable to add the fire effect onto the candles which was quite disappointing, but I like the effect of the dust and I think it makes up for it.

In conclusion, to apply this project to the brief I think it is somewhat of a success. I feel as though technically I have tried my best, this is something that I appear to struggle with a lot as I miss out things or not fully understand them, but I tried my hardest to research everything I was doing. This project has been a lot of knowing what you don't know and that slowed me down a lot. This slowness did allow me to come up with a decent result though in terms of looks and the aesthetics side of things is probably what I am most happy with in the end.

There is a lot that I would have done differently in this project but I think the majority is down to hindsight and would have allowed me to not redo things as much as I ended up having to. I would have tried to use programs like zbrush more or create more high polys in max and in the end create a much more polished environment with better modelling and more thoughtful texturing.

Overall, there's a lot that I am happy with on my terms as I feel as though I have come far in this project. Though, I know there would be a lot more to improve on if I wanted this to be up to an industry standard - I hope to learn how to make that big push soon.

Foliage & Particle Systems

 12/05/21 - Week 32

 To finish this project, I finally added the foliage and particle systems planned. 

For the foliage, I took the approach that I am already comfortable with, this includes drawing out the foliage on photoshop and then creating a normal map using the 3D functions on photoshop. I then took these onto its own plane each to prepare these for engine. I think if I had more time I would have liked to try a sculpting approach to the foliage but I was worried that I wouldn't be able to create good looking foliage in time, in hindsight I think it would have been very beneficial to the scene as I feel the foliage would have just looked more professional. However, the photoshop method does look very stylised so I think for this project it doesn't matter overly much as it somewhat blends in.

To put these into engine, I used the foliage tool, I haven't used this before but with a few bits of troubleshooting with the anchor points I eventually figured out how to place all my foliage. This sped things up a lot and the result looked much like how I imagined it. The only thing I was a bit disappointed with the ivy as I think that it doesn't look as good as the grass and clovers, though I am pretty sure this is just down to my foliage drawing skill.

I then manually placed the leaves and flowers as these were specific to some areas.

As you can see in this screenshot, there are some effects that have been applied to the foliage. This really made the foliage come to life.

I firstly made the material "2-sided foliage" instead of default lit and then added a brighter green to my base colour through the add function and plugged this into subsurface colour. This creates the translucent, halo effect that you can see mostly in the ivy and leaves that are being hit by the directional light. This makes the foliage a lot more realistic and also more interesting and aesthetically pleasing in my opinion.

I also wanted to add some wind that would effect the foliage. This also turned out to be quite a simple effect that was mainly created by the simpleGrassWind node, controlled by a couple of parameters for the speed and intensity. It effects both the base colour and normal by using the multiply function.

I didn't have too many issues here, surprisingly, and I was happy with the outcome I had produced for the foliage since it livened up the scene a lot more.

Another way I wanted to liven up the scene was through the use of particle systems, initially I wanted some dust and also some flames on the candle sticks. Unfortunately, though I tried a lot of things I couldn't get the flames to be emissive so I had to eventually give up here. I am not sure why this is but it just continuously looked dull. Overall though, I don't think the scene suffered too much without them.

For the dust effects, I followed a tutorial to figure out the correct settings. It was an average particle creation as it just included the use of colour over life to control the visibility over time and orbit to make it move a little bit. I also set the collision to kill when touching an object/other particle. This was mainly because I thought it would be more efficient though I did end up having to use 2 different particle emitters in engine because of this so I am unsure if it would have been better or not.

Here is the finished result. I'm quite happy with it and I think that the foliage and particle effects has made the scene look a lot more professional and interesting to be in the environment. As previously mentioned, there is a couple things I would have liked to change about the design of the foliage and I would have really liked to get the flames in but due to lack of time this has meant a slight drop in polish.

Texturing, Decals & Finalising Lighting

 06/05/21 - Week 31

Obviously, I have gotten an extension, unfortunately I haven't been able to sort out finishing my textures over the past couple weeks and therefore wasn't able to move on with the project and finish it. The texturing process has been slow and this was mainly down to my computer not being able to handle painter a lot of the time and so trying to view the textures on my screen with the edits I had just made could sometimes be very tricky and time consuming.

The texturing process wasn't too hard overall though, it was mainly me using my already existing knowledge of painter but slightly adjusting it to try to stylise it and not add so much detail - much like the designer process. I also found some tutorials on stylised textures and took the knowledge from here, which mainly used mask editors to create worn down, highlighted edges, which is a major part of the style I wanted to go for. This is mainly apparent on the wood and metal fixtures as I felt that these would suffer the most damage. I also used these tutorials to find out how to create some colour variation using the generator "light" which was very useful and created just a little bit more nuance.

Here are what all of the finished textures look like in engine currently:

I have also edited the lighting to be much more what I wanted, I used some more tutorials to improve my knowledge of how to light interiors, a lot of which was messing with settings such as bounced light and light scattering. I then created the large beam of light from the window using exponential height fog and some adjustments to the directional light in my scene to create a beam effect without obscuring the scene too much from the fog. I feel as though this is going to really look nice with my particle effects that I have planned, this is definitely going to be some dust and some wind in the foliage.

On top of this, I have also created my decals which weren't too difficult to do in the end as initially I was worried that I wouldn't be able to figure them out. They are pretty much just a stamp on the wall. I created these in designer with my previously made textures for the stone ones and I quickly made a crack shape for the wall where the tree is coming through then utilised transparency to finish them off.

Overall, I do not have too much to finish now, but the extension has really helped me to put polish on this project that I would have not been able to without it - without it I don't think I even would have had time to finish the texturing! I am very happy with how this project is looking, though some of the textures are a bit rough in places or not exactly up to scratch to the point where I feel they are perfect and I think that speaks for a lot of the project right now.

Finished Boss Monster

 30/04/21 - Week 30

I have now finished my boss monster alongside my arena. I finished this piece off by adding some blood dripping from the dress and wings to help with the boss feeling and also a call out of the face as well as a scale factor for more context. I ended up deciding that I didn't want to add anything more as thinking about the subject of my boss, the fact that it is a fallen angel/Satan like depiction can easily play into a more normal angelic figure as lots of pre-existing depictions of those two beings are angelic in nature.

 I think there are a lot of similarities in the process that went wrong between the boss arena and the boss itself. The main one is definitely not sticking to my original idea and eventually coming up with something different where the idea is not as strong but still produces a mediocre result. However, I am not sure if perhaps this was needed since the level itself was not what I thought so having the angel as a bone or organic structure would not necessarily make sense with the context of this in the cathedral not being apparent. Instead, I have come up with something that is not particularly unique but with the arena in mind I think it works to some extent.

I did try to give this piece nice rendering and have the level of detail that I wanted and I do think that this has worked but in terms of detail, the final design has really let this down, I feel like there are some large areas where work needs doing such as the wings, sword and dress as there isn't enough ornate detailing. This is definitely a design process issue, I am not very well adjusted to adding detail at the final stage and this piece definitely shows that as it needs that extra level of tertiary detail to really make it anything special.

As for the positives of this piece, as mentioned, I do like the overall render of the piece and I think for my own skills this piece lives up to them. I am especially proud of the rendering on the sword as I am not used to this kind of material and I think the rendering looks alright, though obviously can always be improved. The finished design though is very mediocre to me and I am not a fan of that, but these are my design limits I feel as sometimes I do lack the creativity to get to a high level of design, so overall I am somewhat happy with my final creation.

Overall, I am definitely happier with the arena rather than the boss itself as I can see lots of room for improvement and looking back, a lot of time where I could have improved it and tried to push myself a little more.

National Museum of the USAF

 25/04/21 - Week 29

This week, we had a virtual tour of the National Museum of the USAF. This was a rather interesting tour and I surprised with how interesting I found some of the planes. I started off by creating 4 different sketches. I think these turned out very sketchy and I didn't try too hard with these because I wanted to focus my efforts onto the final piece more. I was originally going to do a different plane for the final piece but I liked the results of one of the sketches more.

I wanted to make sure the sketch was a bit more prepared than the last vehicle sketch and I think I succeed a bit more in this sense since the plane looks more proportionally correct and follows the correct perspective. I also tried to make the lines a lot straighter and more true to angle so I didn't have to fix this later.

As I started to add some shading into this piece, it was looking a lot better than the vehicle piece already. I think some of this is down to the already interesting lighting which had a lot of contrast and really helped to add clear defined features to the piece, I was also a lot slower with the application of shading and adding detail because I wanted things to look less thrown together and this definitely showed.

I also went in a bit earlier with the charcoal as I thought this added much needed contrast to the vehicle piece, it again worked well here and it did add much needed darker value to the piece. There is still a lot to improve here and I think using even more time to get my lines straighter and more well defined would have helped boost this piece up to the next level. 

I also do notice some perspective and shape issues mainly on the rounded pieces, I found them quite difficult to get the right shading in general here and I think this was because I didn't notice issues in the piece from the start.

Overall, I think this piece has turned out much better than the previous vehicle piece as the shading is much more realistic. The combination of the smaller details and the good level of contrast helped this piece a lot too but the aforementioned issues don't allow this piece to come together in my opinion.

Finished Boss Arena

 23/04/21 - Week 29

Now I have worked some more on the boss monster, I have finally finished the Boss Arena.

This was mainly completed by adding the carpet and some blood on the altar as this is included in the boss' design. For the final image I have also added some decoration to the piece, material callouts and some text/annotations for some description, there is a version without the annotation on the level itself included on the PowerPoint.

The successes of this piece are mainly in the overall structure and basic concept, in my opinion. I think there are a lot of successes in the shape of the arena and it has the grandness that I wanted from it - mainly from the scale and the detail in some of the areas. I also really think the piece benefited from the red carpet as it filled a lot of empty space and also a pop of colour that I was initially unaware the piece needed.

The way the arena was constructed was a new method to me but I think the fact that this piece has only few perspective errors means that it instantly makes it look a lot more professional. I will definitely use this method more when creating scenes like this as the process was sped up quite a lot. Though this took me a while as a whole, the rendering process wasn't too slow and I think I was able to add a lot of depth and drama to the scene easily without having to worry about my perspective being off.

The lowest point of this piece is definitely the rendering of the materials, however. Though I have included some material callouts, I struggled lots to full realise the materials that I wanted from the piece, especially the bone. As a whole this piece lacks the inspiration from the initial concept and I would have loved for it to have a better resemblance to the thoughts I was having at the beginning. Even though I like the details I have included in the arena, I think having more obvious bone structure and bone accents would have put the arena up a level as it would be much more unique, boss-level light and nuanced. Noticing the fact that the arena as a whole was not looking as I initially wanted I essentially gave up at one point in trying to properly render the bone how I wanted it to, this was definitely a mistake and if I were to go back and redo this piece I would probably change a lot of the interior design and try to make my substance designer materials more accurate to the plan.

There was a lot of time in this project where I was thinking about starting over to get the initial idea back, but in the end I am somewhat glad I didn't. I think the idea is definitely different and perhaps not as successful as it could have been in comparison, but I still think this piece has some good aspects to it and most importantly has drama and looking at it now, I think it does have the eligibility to be a boss level.

Overall, there is a lot of positives and negatives in this piece but I think I am overall proud of it unlike some other projects I have completed during my time on the course.

Final Piece Development

 22/04/21 - Week 29

To start, I took my chosen colour and started to add some layers of shadow and highlights to result with this. This is how I usually render human figures so this was not too challenging for me. I then collapsed all the layers and began to render out the shading. I went for a strong back light as I felt it was a bit more descriptive of the lighting of the arena itself - I also made the lighting a warm yellow/orange to also imitate the arena lighting. I think this lighting is pretty impactful and I am pleased with the way it turned out in the end.

As I got more into rendering, I slightly changed some of the features such as the chestplate and the bottom of the dress as I felt it wasnt working as well as it could, but these features definitely helped to add some more detail. Here, a lot of the lighting has been rendered out significantly and the piece was starting to look much more like I wanted it to. However, I did slightly struggle with some of the rendering such as the sword and red jewels, I don't render this type of material much but I feel that I eventually got to a good place with the lighting and texture by increasing the contrast and adding some more accurate highlights. I also struggled somewhat with the metallic objects but these just take a little more time for me to figure out as they are more reflective.

As I came to close off the front view, doing so by increasing a lot of contrast in quite a few areas such as the wings to create a more dramatic look and improving the texturing on the sword again to make it look as good as I could make it, I moved on to the back view. I didn't have too much of a plan for this area but I decided I wanted to place some gold detailing onto the back, I ended up going with a cross as I felt that this had some contextual connotations. I decided not to also include the sword and scales since I felt they were accurately described in the front quarter view already, so to save some time I just went with the main body. At this point I was starting to notice that the boss wasn't exactly how I imagined and I became concerned that the boss wasn't "evil" enough and was a bit inconspicuous which wasn't really what I wanted.

After adding some more detail to the back, I was still thinking about the previous comments and have started to consider some options on how to approach adding some quick and convenient details to make the boss look a bit more evil looking. I want something that isn't too hard to work into the piece since I have already almost finished it. I think a good way to do this would perhaps be to adjust the wing shape or add something to the face that is a bit more menacing, I am currently thinking that a mouth of some sort of lots of eyes could be the way to go. I don't, however, want it to look out of place or over the top as the face being blank adds some amount of mystery that I want to keep. I will think on this more and do some tests then eventually finish this piece soon.