Project Wrap Up

 11/12/20 - Week 10

This term, we set out to create a backyard slice. This project was quite difficult and I learnt a lot that was new to me. This set me back a lot and I feel if I were to do it again I could do it way more efficiently and things would probably have looked better as I would have had more time that way. 

I started off this project not knowing anything about Unreal, and I am quite pleased with the knowledge I have built up, I managed to even have time to include a small use of particle systems which is the fire in the fireplace. Last year when we were learning about particle systems I felt very overwhelmed by it and barely understood it. I now have a super basic understanding but I think I could use it to create more simplistic particles if I wanted to.

Another major thing I learnt was the workflow of low to high poly, though I don't think I understood it at first, I now have a pretty good understanding of it and if I were to do a project with this workflow again I think I would be able to implement it much better, this is the timesaver that I needed. I would constantly go back and forth between modelling, texturing and creating high poly versions of things. This meant I kept needing to unwrap my models and add smoothing groups, change textures etc. These are all simple things, but over time they add up and I lost time quite quickly.

Apart from the major time losses in this project, a couple things I failed to tackle correctly is the lighting and the plants. I found lighting super difficult and though I watched quite a few videos on lighting in unreal, I still couldn't make mine look realistic. I wanted to create a peaceful sunset scene that managed to still highlight all the assets in the scene. Though the lighting is fine for some assets, it doesn't capture others and makes some look dark and dull.

The foliage in the scene I mentioned in my previous post. If I'd have known how much more room I'd have left in the budget I would have made these plants much more detailed. I think they look ok, but they also don't look very complex or nice in some cases, though if anything, they do add a lot to the backyard and tie everything together. I'm happy with them in that sense.

As for things I feel I've done well, I am the most happy with my textures. I really enjoyed using designer in this project, since I learnt it for the summer project I found it easy to use. I also made a lot of the textures on my own accord and without any tutorials and I am quite proud of that even though my textures aren't particularly complex, apart from the chairs. I still think they work in the scene and I feel they look somewhat realistic and using painter to aid my designer basematerials helped to break them up and add more realism to them. 

Another thing I like about my project is probably the overall composition. To me, I feel like I have created the sort of style I wanted to. It's interesting and not too empty or too busy, and I like the industrial style a lot so I think its quite aesthetically pleasing. Obviously, good lighting and better plants could have aided the aesthetic of the piece.

Overall, there's a lot that went wrong with this project, but it was naturally only something I could see in retrospect since I was learning a lot of the core parts of this project as I was going along. If we are to use these skills any time soon I will definitely be able to lay out my workflow much better and hopefully create something that looks a bit more professional.