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.