Final Week! Production ends and reviewing the project

That's a wrap on our VR project. It has certainly been an experience exploring a new medium, seeing how immersive VR can be as well as learning about its technical limitations. To conclude the project, we primarily have spent this week prepping for the presentation next Wednesday to Sony, ensuring our project is submitted correctly and running according to the project specifications given (focusing on running at a consistent 80 FPS).


Kyran:

Production:

For me this week has really been about ensuring the team has put everything they have worked on over the course of the project and ensure it is in the UE4 scene. To add to this, I put a hard and soft deadline on the project to take precaution of working all the way up to the very deadline. It feels very nice to say that the scope of the production was achievable and we met the majority of all tasks we originally set out to do and even went beyond that and included some very interesting stretch goals.

Assets:

Each team member had to create one of these pages to show the exacts of the work they had been working on throughout the duration of the project. I'm rather pleased with the assets I have been making throughout the project, I have had the chance to work on some interesting challenges and learned a lot through working on these props and environment pieces.



Hannah:

This week our time was spent cleaning up the project and finalising our assets for submission. As a last minute fix up I helped Luke and Chris prep the textures for the sawdust and hay piles, they were proving rather tricky with their Alpha masks and the texture itself. I used photos from my recent research trip to make the basic texture and put these into designer to get the normal and packed map information. Added with some feedback from tutor Henry we I added some nodes to aid the alpha fade off and added some subsurface scattering.



We were also putting our assets together ready for peer parking and it was a really nice opportunity for all of us to reflect on what we had done. Everyone has done a lot throughout this project and it's really exciting to see how far we all have come.




Willow:

This week has brought to the end of production, making it a very busy week for last minute touches. For me this meant having a final review on lighting with a couple different people with more knowledge on the subject that me to see how it can be approved. I did this on a one to one basis having them play through while I noted down what they said so I could go through a tick them off as I completed the items on the list.  This took up most of week for myself. I also took time to clean up the lights and making sure they were optimised fully.
As this week was the conclusion I took the time to also organise all my work over the last 12-13 weeks on a A4 sheet of paper for submission.



Josef:



Adrian:


















Max:

This week for me has been a very relaxed one because thankfully as much as I have loved working with the team and on this project it is finally over and I can enjoy the final product! This week I have worked on fixing a couple textures and adding blood decals. I am really happy with the game and I think the team effort has been amazing to create a great experience. Another note I am so impressed with Urim’s talent of making truly believable cinematics. Cannot wait for the next project and hope I have a team as amazing as this one.






Urim:

The final full week of production has come to an end and I'm very pleased the way this project has turned out. Everyone did amazingly. This week I did 2 different videos for the cinematic sequence. It was a first pass video with an old scene to test out the shots and get feedback on what type of shots need improving. I also created an environment only cinematic showcasing just the assets and overall scene. I then refined some of the assets that needed new textures like the fence. I also fixed some audio issues that needed fixing i.e. sounds were too low or not working. Finally, I re-recorded the game play and some shots within the final scene. I put them together and created the 3 cinematics for the project.



Viktor:

This week I've finished more of the contact shadow decals, so for all the assets that stood out we could add them to ground them in the scene.




After doing the snake skin simulations in nCloth, I've worked on a tiling texture to use with them.




As last week I had to help with texturing work on the chamber, I got given the levers too this Monday to treat them in a similar way, so we can avoid mis-matching textures and colours. I'm very happy with how they've turned out.



Being so close to the end of this project, luckily there's not a lot left to do, so I could work a little bit on polishing some textures. the plague mask got some more variations, some damage and grime on it and sits much better in the scene.



With basically all of my assets ticked off from the list, I was able to help the team with cleaning up the project. This included checking and correcting naming conventions, checking texture sizes and resizing them if they were over 2K, deleting assets that are old versions and not used in the scene at all and setting up LODs for assets that didn't have any. As there are no tools for this cleanup to be automated, I had to do everything manually, one by one. Took around 3 days to get around it, but worth the effort. We might even got a frame or two!




Shay:
27/02/2020

I Missed a couple weeks of blogs so i'm to quickly go over the things I done and include some images.

I was advised to make the decals into a atlas so that I didn't have multiple materials. I made several of these to add variation to the blood. I had to do a lot of trail and error for the blood as it wasn't looking right in the scene.



Keep getting feedback on the plaster and how it look empty so I had to go back and edit it. I made another worn out material and used vertex painting to blend them. Although you cant really see them in the scene it does it does add variation to it.



In the team meeting someone mentioned adding vertex painting to the tiles to make them more bloody so that's what I did. I made a quick blood material in  Substance Designer and added into the scene. The results came out pretty well and the team seemed to like it.


Dirt decals also were made and added into the scene



For the Wooden floor material Simon mentioned he would like to see more height variation so I fixed that. He also told me to cut off the beams that go straight through the pillar as the wood wouldn't do that in real life. I decided to vertex paint a more worn down version of the wood to add more variation. 






Kevin:

For this, I focus on doing my final props newspaper and different types of books.
During the last week notice my I had refined some assets as the roughness level was not good enough.
I had to create textures in substance to help roughness value

1. Creates variation of sculpting  on the books



2. create different materials
3. Create  patterns for alphas in Maya
4. Different text for newspaper



Final I had gathered all the props I had done for the project  to showcase

what I have done this project.




To conclude this blog and the project, it has really come together at the end and the team has managed to deliver an immersive VR escape room experience, with strong character and personality in the environment.

GIF progress of Lab Room:





GIF progress of Surgical Theatre:

Week 9- The project comes together!

To summarise this week, it's been incredibly busy trying to thread together the last bulk of the work we require to complete the project. The team has been working hard throughout the week, going back over assets to tweak and improve, set dressing and finishing off the remainder of the asset list. With the deadline closing in (11th Feb) we still need to ensure our project is consistently running at 80 FPS, and have our project submitted with all the requirements. I've decided that the team will hand in the project on the 6th to avoid any last minute stress and pressures.

Kyran:

For me this week has primarily been about polishing up assets I have already created, as well as working on a few new exciting things for the project!

Decals:

Earlier in the week our tutor Simon, gave us some very constructive feedback and mentioned about suggestive clues to one of our puzzles that requires a person to go looking for cards with numbers and letters on them. So I decided to make a little chalk decal to outline where the cards should be, with two or three already in place it will help familiarise the player with their current objective and hint them towards going to find the lost few pieces.

Exit Door:

One of my other tasks this week was to finish the creation of the exit door, this is a task that had been on going for a few weeks but other assets or problems came up which for a short while meant I needed to leave the asset and re visit it at a later date.

With this asset being rather large in the scene I wanted to make sure I got the most optimal results out of my UV Map. By making half of the door (cutting the image below in half) I was able to get a better texture resolution out of the asset and holding up good quality at only being a 1k material.



World aligned material:

After some talks with Viktor, we thought it could be a nice idea to add a world aligned material to the cages in the second room; having a grungier bottom to the cage and having a gradient fall off. After some set up and help from tutors, I was able to learn a little about how to set up the pre made material function inside of unreal. The way this has been set up, allows the material function to be used with any asset within the scene, and in a separate instance you can control the gradient fall of each individual object.



Hannah:

This week Hannah has primarily been focusing on refining and polishing up the art bible ready for our final presentation of the project. Apart from this, She travelled to a stables near where she lives to find some first hand references that could potentially be useful for creating hay piles in the cages, and finished off the sinks that sit in the second room.





Josef:

Josef had a particularly big task this week with finishing off the stasis chamber, lots of hours and hard work have been put into the chamber to make it look as good as possible in the finished result.
He also worked alongside Viktor who helped with polishing up the texturing side of the process, when looking in scene it works really coherently which is great to see.




Chris:

This week I started by continuing to set dress areas of the scene with wires and various other props to give the scene more life. Cushions were arranged in the theatre to appear as if a lecture had just finished or had been set up ready for a new one, and the areas around the sinks and cage were also given some attention. Wires now connect to the lamps, chandelier, and stasis chamber. For the later part of the week, I had a look at Shay's saw dust texture and began making tweaks in substance designer to create a finer grained texture.

Willow:

Willow has been working throughout the week tweaking the lighting more, after seeing a drastic turn around from the last Sony presentation, the progression has been extraordinary and the overall impact the lighting is having in setting the tone and atmosphere for the environment is really strong. This week she's been tweaking colour grading and even made a shadow decal to put into the environment. Movable objects in VR have a hard time with casting good shadows so a decal is a good solution to this problem.

Without decal


With decal


Lighting Progress


Max:

This week Max has been revisiting some assets in the scene that need touch ups here and there, little details like adding restraints to the surgery table have now been included. he's also spent some time on the back panel of the levers- working to improve the overall texture quality by adding some normal details where before it was looking a little flat. To polish it off he's going to be going back and adding damages and paint wearing where the levers are getting pulled down.

Urim:

Apart from working on improving the audio in the scene; Urim has been working this week to plan out the games sequencer. So once the project is complete he can add the sequencer trailer and it will be a really cool way to showcase the environment we have made.

Rough storyboard drafting




Adrian:

As Adrian finished off his asset list earlier this week, we got him to jump in and help with the creating of decals in the scene. Here you will find the water damage/ damp decals as well as some scratch marks for the flooring where there would be frequent movement of the chairs and furniture.



We also received frequent feedback that the door was feeling far too large when playing it in game. So to act upon that Adrian changed the scale slightly and added beams just to frame the door a little better.





















Viktor:

Viktor has been extremely versatile this week; from texturing the chamber to refining snake skin. Viktor has been working on making sure the stasis chamber gets finished in time for our deadline- having the job spilt between two people made the task much faster to complete and gave the results we needed.

chamber interior


Chamber Exterior


Snake Skins:

For a second pass Viktor has gone back and re simulated the snake skins; due to the nature of things changing in a game environment, the beams have been shuffled. However, now they're in specific areas with unique simulations it will add a lot of visual interest to the environment! Especially if you look to the ceiling.




Occlusion decals:

A very nice detail to be added to movable objects in the environment. VR heavily punishes shadows with movable objects due to the technical limitations put on the lighting. This decal creates a cast shadow underneath the object to help it sit better in the environment.



Luke:

This week Luke has been helping with getting some newer small props into the environment; such as a Stool, shackles for the cage, cross and even helping making the stacks of hay for the cages. All assets are now placed inside of engine and really help with the setting of the environment.

Shay:

Shay has been working tirelessly to get the decals into the environment alongside some help from others. The progression has been phenomenal and it has truly built an atmosphere and character to the scene.




Kevin:

Kevin this week has been continuing working on some of the smaller assets in the scene, more books and little magazines for the vomitorium area. These assets once in scene will help break up the set of books we already have and I believe it will look less repeated to the players.





To conclude this blog post, the team has been very productive this week, with only a few days left of production on this project, the environment has really taken shape and I look forwards to seeing the final result we output on the 6th!