Week 5- The last stretch before the Christmas holidays!

Out of all the weeks we have worked so far in production, the project has had the most amount of progression this week. Layout of the environment has become far clearer as well as the atmosphere we're trying to create has started to become more refined.

The team has been hard at work this week to reach our 5th week milestone which was to have the first room to a complete standard; so once we get back from the Christmas holidays, we can invest more time into the second room (the surgical theatre). To summarise we're on track with the project and certainly reached the bulk of our milestone. The stasis chamber is still in need of refinement due to the sheer size of it in the environment, and the more mechanical/ industrial elements inside the lab room still need to be included to feel more grounded to the environment we are set in. Asides from this, the overall progression throughout the week has been phenomenal.


Below I've attached two images to show the progression of the first room environment over the course of the last month. This really shows the hard work the team has been putting into the project over the last month.

November 11th 2019



December 13th 2019



Hannah:

The final week before our Christmas break we've had a bit of an overhaul on lighting and making sure our Base Colours across our assets are a little bit more denatured and match their real world counterparts. Its made a huge shift in the tone and quality of our scene and for the better! Not to mention Shay doing an awesome job pushing the quality of our floor material.

I have managed to finally get working on foliage for the scene and its looking like I'll be able to get 4 plants on one texture map. Warming up with some dried mistletoe and garlic I'm hoping to also introduce some colour with a living Wolfsbane plant with some lush green and purples.




Willow:

This week has been extremely productive for myself. Due to issues with determining colour values of wood in our environment I have had a hard time lighting the environment as a whole, so while the rest of the team began to work on this issue I decided to experiment with creating softer lighting. To do this I stripped the environment momentarily of its artificial lighting and used a new technique that was introduced to me of using strong emmisives on planes to create a area light. This is due to the fact their aren't any lights in unreal engine that naturally mimic area lights which are often used on film sets to try achieve natural soft lighting. This took a lot of tweaking to get right. And I ran into many issues. Such as it not seeming to really cast much shadow at all. It causing strange intensity on certain objects etc. However through some research, so help from tutors and a lot of general trial and error I eventually managed to create something that feels quite pleasing to the eye and reads well. Once this stage was complete I could begin to play with the level of bounce light in the room and how these would effect my shadowing.
Once we had a floor that we where all happier with in the lab room I began to add the artificial light back into the room. For now I haven't made this too yellow as I want to wait for all the saturation issues in the room to be resolved first and foremost. But I've started to place them and experiment with how this would effect the room.
This now also gives me more time to start complete lighting in the next room and make some small tweaks to the lab room as I continue.

Furthermore I'm very happy with how well optimised all my lighting is at this point as due to the fact most of it is simply coming from emmisives, hopefully helping future frame rate issues.

Kyran:

An incredibly busy week for sure. The team has been hard at work for the last stretch before our Christmas break. With this there have been some really substantial changes to the materials and overall composition of the scene.

Layout and set dressing:

Through the week, There had been a few changes to the layout. I experimented with separating  the room into sections- Once doing this, I asked a few of the tutors to play and they felt the space was working and felt better.

Props:

Through the majority of the week I spent time refining texture passes on my assets that I have already put into the scene, this primarily includes the drawers. As they are a quite central in the scene, it's important they maintain a high level of detail, I also revisited the magnifying device to improve some of the materials.





Wires- It was also made clear to us that there is currently a lack of grounding the 'lab' like feeling in the environment due to there being no industrial elements asides from the large stasis chamber. Once Tom created a spline tool for us, I made a mesh that can be used in the spline tool around the scene. The next step is to start creating output points and connections for the wires to make every element feel  believable.

Photogrammetry:

One of the biggest issues we've had over the week is the material for the flooring; we kept getting feedback that it wasn't working with the environment and that it needed work. So myself and Shay set out to our point of reference to take some images of the wooden floorboards; then processing this inside of reality capture to create the scanned data. Once this was done I handed the rest over to Shay to work into the materials and the result has been extremely good and efficient, especially when taking into account production time. I was particularly pleased with the overall results of the wooden floor planks; taking the images in an environment  where the lighting was quite strong and not very neutral in any areas made the task challenging. To summarise the process, it was really beneficial because we was quickly able to create real looking wood as supposed to relying on procedural methods.




It's the Christmas holidays now; once we are back in as a team, we have a total of 4 production weeks left until our soft deadline, which is then followed by the next week with the actual deadline where we then present our project to Sony.

Urim:


This week I worked on making sure the theatre area was somewhat to a complete stage in terms of the architecture. I had to make sure the standing area was complete and textured, then also focus on the hand railing that needed to be done. So I managed to make each row of rails as one mesh with a pole all in 1 texture set making it a lot more efficient. I then placed all the poles to the correct position inside the engine. Once this was in the scene, I then worked on the vomitorium exit and trying to get that at a good standard before the week finished. I had to look up some references on how they can be made and as a team we came to the conclusion that there should be no top piece only sides. This way we can lit an emblem or some sort of asset on top of the door to make it stand out more. We also decided to make it stairs as you go down the exit as it just works better. Currently was working on modelling the hand rails for the stairs section and making sure those models are done and in the scene as soon as possible.








Josepf:

The holidays begin and production "officially" halts. Many us however will still continue through the holidays. But all in all, we are in a good position. Simon liked where we were before we finish and it feels like we can reach our deadlines and present a complete scene.

In terms of prop output, it's going well some people are already reaching the ends of their asset lists, I'm currently still stuck on the retopoing and UVing of the stasis chamber which has been taking up the majority of my time. The quality of the assets is holding and they are looking good across the board. The main reason it's taking so long is because it's an interactive prop, so with the oncoming feedback, changes are made. For instance, me and Thomas changed the mechanism and now it's functionally and structurally sound; this did take a redesign and an evening of blueprinting to get right however. The Interior has also been improved adding varying surfaces and details.

I plan to finish this chamber over the holidays and proceed to finish my asset list which just has the hanging wolf pelt remaining.

Feedback has been routinely given in conjunction with me and Hannah and the assets show that, as they are holding up well and reflect the reference material. In conclusion, well done to the team for the constant high class performance which has enabled us to get here. We are fully visualising our collective idea and hopefully it will be a rewarding result.


Shay:

This week I had to do more work on the floor as it still wasn't looking realistic enough. I found out that we wasn't allowed to use megascans so we had to find another way. Kyran took some pictures of the flooring from the place we are using as reference. He used the photogrammetry software to extract all the information in the base colour and normals in the photos. It was my job after to add normal detail on top of the original and making the image tile.


The feedback I got on Thursday was that the material was going in the right direction. The roughness variation doesn't really show up in Vr so I really had to bump up the contrast, the same for the normals. It has been a tedious process so far but I have definitely learnt a lot. Wood is hard! Also I did a quick texture pass on my saw dust box and added it into the scene. Just waiting for feedback to see what I need to change.






Kevin:



This week I tried to finish texture in mop and bucket

I had a lot of problems along the ways including the The way that I sculpt the mop head look like a broom.
So  I learn a new method called the latter's tool, so I can Curve mop in and sculpt on it in zbrush.

Add further problems by retopo high poly to low poly

Thomas:

9/12/2019: I change the lever puzzle so that it wasn't dynamic, so that the artists could now move the levers around the scene wherever they wanted. After that, I added sound to the level. Speaking of sound, I added a bit more fixes to the gramophone.

10/12/2019: Added more sounds to the scene, changed the location of the chamber door, since it wasn't changed in mechanics. We also took care of the fps issue around the scene, it was a cubemap, rendering the scene 3 times.

11/12/2019: Added a pipetool, so that artists can procedurally place pipes thanks to splines. This was part of Juriaan's pipe tools, which was modified slightly to allow custom profile size.

12/12/2019: Helped luke with UVing bandages, and got to fix chamber to work with snap angle, now fully works.

To conclude the blog post:

I've been incredibly impressed with how the production is running within the team and as it stands, we are on track to be able to complete the full scope of the project we set out to do which is really fantastic; with 4 weeks left of production once back from holiday (discarding the final week deadline) We have a good amount of time to include more of our stretch goals and push the overall quality of the environment.

Lastly,

Merry Christmas!

Week 4- Production continues and the holidays approach!

As it currently stands, the team is working through each of their assigned assets to complete the environment- to reach our next milestone; to have the first room and stasis chamber to a strong completed standard by the time we break up for Christmas may prove to be challenging as it's at the end of the coming week. However, If everyone works efficiently, it seems to be a very achievable goal to reach. Here are some of the following tasks we are currently acting on still based on the feedback received from the Sony presentation:

• Give the environment more life- we are currently doing this through including key sound elements such as; creaky floor boards, hissing steam, crows, static coming from lights and even a phonograph that plays music for the player.
• A big change in the secret entrance and exit- being that the bookcase entrance has changed from being a spinning door to a bookcase that now splits down the middle and opens up towards the player; this allows us to have a more dramatic lighting scenario without an awkward wall splitting the view down the middle.
• Populating the environment and refining texture passes: anything we had made for the presentation we have gone back to revisit, creating a higher quality pass for the asset to be included in the game, as well as creating new assets that give strong story telling elements to the environment we are creating.

Here is what everyone has been getting up to this week:

Hannah:

This week we had some issues with frame rate in VR and there was a lot of experimenting about how to fix this. Knowing that the composition of the environment wasn't really working how it was anyways, Willow and myself started to change the layout and spread out the interactions for the player. This helped a little but not hugely...turns out Viktor fixing the majority of the LOD's is what did the trick! 

After a couple more revisits and feedback sessions our layout has changed dramatically and all for the better! 

I was able to continue on with my journals and get some unique illustrations in there to help drive the narrative a bit more. I will still need to fix the text on the pages as it's not very clear to read at the moment. The same for the jars. The journals also have 3 different colour variations driven by the Base Colour. I also separated out a bunch of small photographs that we can now use to place the anagram code on the back of, like a card collection the player can interact with. 

To help with draw calls this week I bundled up several meshes of the pots and journals so that instead of placing lots of individual books we can place one clump all at once. 

I've also crept along a little further with the garlic, making a rough pass texture on the leaves so I can add some normal detail in zbrush and create leaf planes. Hopefully I'll be able to get a couple of plant UVs on the one texture map. 

Kyran:

Another week of production where the team has been working hard; The team is currently putting it's efforts into polishing up the first room before the Christmas break so once we come back from our holidays we have our first room to a good strong standard. Whilst this is happening, our main environment artist is putting his efforts into completing the modular pieces in both rooms- All architectural elements will be in place and more refined for next week. 

Looking at the production; the team is working well and getting tasks complete efficiently- hitting our next milestone of making the first room feel complete is achievable. 

We received some feedback through the week from tutors about the project, one thing we all couldn't make sense of was the layout of the environment in the first room; it seemed to have no sense of direction and certain areas were over cluttered creating some pinching points. Thursday morning myself, Hannah and Joseph re constructed an idea of the layout in the room to make it feel more grounded, and lead the player in a certain direction. Once we fleshed this idea out we had our tutor look over it and he agreed it had a better composition.

This weeks assets I've worked on:

Dire wolf skull:

At the beginning of the wee I textured my Dire wolf skull- this came out really well in the end with high levels of detail; we're using images in a part of our texturing process to create a realistic material, the skull illustrates this well.

Magnifying device:

One of the slightly smaller props in the scene, but it has a lot of interesting shapes, I spent one day working on the little asset to get it to a nice quality; I will need to revisit it as it includes glass, as well as I need to refine the texture pass a little more.

Drawers:

One of the early Meshes I worked on was a set of drawers, I revisited these for a few days to refine them and improve the overall quality- They have now been made so the top row can be opened by the player. and come in two different sizes 2x3 and 4x3. I then gave a small sculpting pass over the already made low poly, so that I could capture some strong normal map details.

Shelving;

In the later end of the week I started some wall shelving that can be attached to the walls; these can be nicely set dressed with other smaller props in the scene. We have also been having trouble where the walls are feeling rather empty, so this could be a really quick and simple solution to that issue.

Glass Shader testing:

As our scene could end up requiring some glass elements in the game, I've been considering the best way to approach this, and found a way to make a cheap glass shader that is fitting for VR Usage- Setting up the material to use dithered rendering actually makes using glass very applicable in VR, of course it will need to be stress tested, but it could be a strong solution to making glass applicable in the lab room.

Layout changes:

One of the main points of feedback our tutors kept coming back to was that the wood structure beams felt too thick and chunky. I reviewed this and decided to change how they are placed in the scene a little bit. 

Adrian:

This I work on modelling  the Medical/Surgical Bag. 

Monday

Finished the block out ready for some Zbrush action.

Tuesday

Spent the day sculpting using dynmesh and sub- dividing methods. I projected the dymesh subtool on to the lowest sub-division (copy of sub tool). Once I had finished sculpting I decimated all the sub-tools ready for retopology in maya.  

Wednesday

Spent the day retopo'ing, UV'ing and test baking.

Thurday

Baked all maps in substance and started texturing. When baking I tend to separate most of my meshes in parts with corresponding high and low meshes. I find this helps to reduce baking errors when different parts of the mesh intersect with each other. Using this method never provides me with a decent looking self occulling AO map.

Friday

Today I noticed a nasty seem along the top of the model as well as baking issues in the same area. I thought that maybe I had forgotten to smooth an edge. But when I opened the low poly model in maya I noticed that I had some how crossed over two edges so they were in each other space. I corrected this and re-baked all maps again. 

I also taught myself how to use Marmoset Toolbag 3. What interested me today, is that one of the features in Marmoset is the ability to bake AO maps while ignore baking groups. This solves the limitations of baking in groups in Substance Painter. I imported the AO map in to Substance Painter and I'm very happy with the result as it really added to help add dimension the to the surface of the model.  

Just need to put the finish touches in the texturing now and I will be ready to move on.

 

 

Chris:

Returning to the Bookshelf once again, we realised that the shelves needed more space to store books and other props, so one shelf was removed to make space. At the same time, it was suggested that the bookshelf should have panels where it splits in half as this would prevent any books from falling off, and so the remodeling process took this into consideration too.

I also revisited the Vistas. Initially the vistas had been left as planes with a simple texture for the block out, so some depth was needed to properly sell the vista as a realistic exterior for the scene.

Also this week, I was able to begin work on the Banner flag. The banner flag will hang in the theatre area, so it needs to be somewhat large. I designed the flag in the shape of a cross to match the logo of the organisation that run the facility. I shall begin texturing next week.

Max:

This week has been a more interesting one for me, this week I have spent all my time working on the operating chair which is raised from the ground towards the end of the game. During the modelling of this chair, I have once again learned a few new things about Maya that'll help me during future projects after I finished the modelling of this chair I dived straight into the UVing and more recently the texturing. It has been an extremely fun asset to work on but even so, I cannot wait to finish it so that it will be over so I can start on something fresh.

Viktor:

This week I have finished the quick first pass on every asset I'm planning to make for the scene and started revisiting them.

First I was experimenting with some cloth simulations in Maya, using nCloth for a snake skin that will be hanging from the beams and it gave me a great result after a bit of fiddling with the settings and scene setup. Once I got the shape I wanted the texturing was just a quick test to see it in scene, but I've learned some new tricks from our tutor Tom, on how to set up a 2 sided material to have different textures on each side. Very clever and useful trick for the future.

The most important of them all the assets was the sarcophagus which has nicely detailed reliefs on it's side and takes up a large chunk of the space. I've spent the last 3 days adding details and sculpting reliefs. It still has another 2-3 days of work on it at least, but should be done to a high standard by the end of next week. 

Urim:

There was a lot to do this week whilst making sure the assets were complete to a high standard and tested in engine and VR. 

We had some frame issues that caused it to drop to 45fps in certain areas. We played around with some of the meshes not being one draw call and also changed the composition and positions of some of the assets to make more sense. This also helped with the frame rate and we managed to get it to a sable fps throughout. With that being said, I managed to finish the small door for the theater room area and texture it. It's also implemented in the game with a texture resolution of 1k. After this I was working on the theater stand area and how I could make this area more efficient in meshes. For the presentation, I did row by row as a mesh and this was not as efficient as it could've been. So in this case, I combined all the rows as one mesh and managed to squeeze all UVs in one texture set. This time round I added steps to the entrance of the stands because it would make more sense, however, in VR walking on stairs is the death of players as it can make you very motion sickness. So in this case, I had to create custom collisions so the player can smoothly walk on the stairs without no jitters. I did this in Maya and imported the meshes as UCX which in unreal is a naming convention of collisions. Before I was able to continue with this mesh I had to work on a more important asset that came up which was the wall that the player enters into the theater room.

For the mid-wall that the player walks into the theater room from the lab, I had to make sure to create a trim on the sides of the edges so it fits much better. As well as this, I had to rescale the size of the wall so that it is smaller than the bookshelf and when the bookshelf does open, the player is a big enough high to walk through with no problems. I then continued texturing the standing area.

Audio. This is one of the most important things in VR. Having great audio can really make a huge difference to a game from being really bad to amazing. Now having an amazing game with amazing audio will make the game even more outstanding. However, there were quite a few rules to follow when making audio for a VR game. The first thing was to enable Oculus Vr Audio plug-in in unreal so it sets up a 3d area sound for the player to experience better audio. Another rule was for the audio to be 44100hz, 16bit, and Mono. Once the audio was found combined for certain things, for the export, I used Adobe media encoder to set those recommended numbers. For some audio that needed mixing, I used Sony Vegas Pro 15 and was able to export from those numbers too, so there were no issues with that. I managed to get together 12 specific sound effect folders and some included multiple files i.g. footsteps had 4 audio files for that folder.

That concludes this weeks progression: At the end of next week we will be reviewing the project and if we have successfully reached our next milestone.

 

Week 3- Sony Presentation and full production

This week has been very busy for the team; we've had Sony come in to view the projects, and a start of full scale production. To summarise the presentation with Sony, we felt that it went very well, they could see good and strong art direction that translated the project strongly. They also gave us a few points to work on for what they would want to see next time they come in to see the projects.

Here's everyone's busy week and what they would like to share below!


Hannah:

Prepping for our presentation to Sony this week I spent the day before making sure our art bible was up to date and coherent for someone looking at it for the first time as well as screenshots of our benchmark assets.
It was a concern how the chamber will be powered and how to give it the hero asset treatment it needs. However after a deep dive into it I really felt like having loads of wires running around would take away from the atmosphere we were trying to create. Looking back at the art bible and the iron lung power source I think something simple with a fuse box nearby and raising it off the floor to be more effective.

The presentation itself went well and we received some very positive feedback. A lot of the feedback on how to improve we were already aware of as a group, which means we are thinking along the right track! We need to make sure the vista eludes to a living world outside and make sure our storytelling elements really drive home the narrative!


After a quick clean up of topology and separating a few pieces out I finally started texturing the journals. As I wasn’t in one day, from home I began analysing references on how to go about my foliage assets and made a start on those too.

Willow:

This week has been very helpful for me in terms of feedback. As we had some representatives from Sony come in to review the block out stage for our project. Overall they seemed very pleased with the stage we where at and they gave some good feedback as to how we as a team and I personally can move forward. Regarding lighting they seemed pleased with my view of how the lighting should in the end look reflecting back on the art boards. They where also happy with the overall colour in the environment.
They suggested to make things a bit more dramatic with more light pouring through from the second room and some darker spots throughout. So this is what I have been working on implementing so far.
I have also had some feedback from tutors this week regarding my lighting and have been told that shadow and highlight values seem to be working, which allows me move onto adding some finer details. I have also re-established the physical light direction in the environment and set up my post process and camera values to allow me to have more control through the environment.

As we move into the next week and production starts to pick up I look forward to continuing to light this environment with its wide range of props.




Joseph:

This week we had the Sony reps in to view our work and reflect their Ideas and criticisms. Interestingly they didn't have many criticisms. They actually really liked the project and enjoyed the demonstration. The comments ranged from we had a strong art bible and a clear art direction to the idea is really cool and the length of the game play is good. Our blockout was playable the whole way through and was already being done to a high standard, so it was a great first impression.

My contribution to the level presentation was an interactive benchmark asset. The Vampire hunting kit. its an asset that combines many smaller assets inside it and in-engine it looks great. The simple interaction of lifting the lid also feels really intuitive and interesting too.

After the presentation I started creating 5x surgical tools a scalpel, general knife, amputation knife, bone-saw and a hand drill all are textured and me and I've taken on the finalisation of the stasis chamber. Interior and exterior final. this should be finished next week and ill proceed to move on to other assets.


All in all another great week. Me and Hannah also reviewed the finished work and gave feedback to the team. Onto next week.

Kyran:

This week the group had to prepare for the Sony presentation on Wednesday morning. With that, we worked strong through Monday and Tuesday to ensure we was out of grey box stage by presentation.

Stasis Chamber:

My biggest role and contribution throughout the week leading up to the presentation was creating our first pass stasis chamber, where the player will start in our game level. It had some challenges; setting it up so it could be opened by the player, as well as having all the interactive valves that the player uses to solve a puzzle. A massive contribution in the mechanics side of the process came from Tom.



Presentation feedback:

Wednesday morning, Hannah, Tom and I, spoke to Sony in a presentation of the project: overall they was impressed with the progress we had made with such little time into development, they then highlighted some areas for us to work on; which we will now make our priority for the next presentation. Some of these key things being the following:

• Stasis chamber- How does it get oxygen? Perhaps piping leading outside the building
• Some scale feels slightly off
• More life into the scene- i.e. sounds, crows flying away from the big vista point
• A more grand entrance into the surgical theatre: opening up a bookcase as supposed to a turning wall.

Dire Wolf Skull:


After this, Thursday I started working on creating a dire wolf skull, one of the other points Sony brought up is that we should start getting in more story telling elements; this really hits the subject on the nose of a monster hunter environment. So far in terms of progression I've finished my High poly mesh, I'm now in the process of retopology, I'm very carefully considering that there's a high possibility that the player will be able to pick this up and hold it close to them. So being generous with the retopology and then use the LOD system inside of unreal engine to make it more efficient for in game use.

  
High poly sculpt of Dire Wolf Skull

Kevin:

This week, I tried to get the posters ready for the presentation that was on Wednesday because it was 1 of the important assets that should be in the scene which shows story development. After finishing the posters, I was allocated to do the chalkboard because the guys from Sony said that the room looked quite empty. After completing the chalkboard, I  was given the task to do a test tube with a stand as it's one of the important props.



Chris:

This week we had the presentation to Sony. Before the presentation, I finished up the Bookshelf I had started on the week before and even made adjustments to its size for it to fit in the scene. Lastly, I created the vistas for both the Lab window and the Theatre which turned out rather well. After the presentation, it was decided that my bookshelf would be used for the secret door. the rest of the week has been spent adjusting the model to fit the space, as well as re UVing and re texturing the model to fit its new requirements.

Urim:

This week was quite a busy week. We had Sony come in on Wednesday and give us feedback on our 2-week progress so far but before that, I had quite a lot to do in terms of getting the blockout stairs done as well as the exit and railings. This meant that I had 2 days to be able to complete it and get it into the scene as soon as possible so that it can be lit and ready to present the following day. I managed to model and UV each of those pieces and stick them into unreal with minor adjustments to fit the scene properly. In terms of textures, I didn't have enough time to complete a basic base colour pass and import them into unreal so I just used one of the wood textures that was made in substance designer as a place holder.


The overall feedback from Sony was amazing, we had great insight on what works and what doesn't form a professional VR studio company. They mentioned a bunch of things that would help us improve the scene immensely. After the presentation, the official production had begun and everyone was back to work with their assets at the highest quality possible. I started to re-evaluate all the meshes in the theatre room and made them more efficient as well as complete the textures for them. I then started working on the small doors and getting them up to a high-quality standard 3d game asset.



Adrian:

Its been an exciting week as we got to show out scene to Sony on Wednesday for feedback (So it was all hands on deck in preparation).

The presentation went well and I have to give props our team members that presented and pitch our scene. They did a fantastic job at coherently explaining and conveying the narrative, mood, mechanics and progress through our scene. They did team the proud.

Speaking of Props, my role this week as an prop artist consisted of making to two prop ready for first pass (the term we used, when the object is modelled and textured and ready to go into the scene for review). I also start to block out the shape of the 3 prop.

Prop 1 - Chandelier for the main theatre




Thankfully this prop was not of the ornate glass chandelier variety, just think of the transparency cost in VR as well setting up the render order ordering. Although I imagine making a ornate glass chandelier would be fun and challenging.

This chandelier is 99% all metal apart from the bulbs. My main challenges making this prop was to keep the poly count down, baking the metal chains on to two planes that are perpendicular that look believable in VR.

The chandelier contains and lot of round pipes and sphere shapes, which can be problematic as to keep the silhouette and shape when viewed up close normally requires an increase polys to stop the curvature of the edges from looking like straight lines.

For this prop, I made sure to leave the parts of the chandelier that are closest the camera with enough poly's to retain the illusion of it being circular. The higher the parts of the chandelier I reduced the poly's on the edges as the viewer is never able to get up close (to help with optimisation).

The metal chains were fun to make and I tried two different approaches. My first was to model the chain (by making and link and duplicating it along an animation path) then to try to bake it on planes. The second method was to apply a normal map (plus alpha map) of a tiling chain link in UV space.

The first approach I found some what troublesome as getting the planes to match the chain geometry was fiddly, it baked ok but looked a little weird in places.

The second one yielded much better results and did a go job at faking the 3D effect of the chains.

With texturing I just applied a painted metal material, then tweak/blended the micro surface normals to try and match the reference imagines. After which I painted a dust colour/texture layer to try and mimic how dust would primarily stick to the top surfaces and not the underneath.

Prop - 2 Spinning Chalkboard



For this prop I made a block out version in Maya, then put it in to Zbrush to soften the edges, give them character and damage. After which I decimated and retopolgised in Maya. For the texturing in substance painter I applied an awesome wooden material created by member of the team. Then further tweaked and painted areas for detail.


I am currently working on modelling an old Victorian leather surgical bag.

Viktor:

Another week of production and feedback from Sony. Great achievements.

The first half of the week we spent on getting everything ready for our presentation on Wednesday which for me included helping out with some environment pieces. The first room needed an extra door and I've done a first pass on the sarcophagus too so we can measure the size and find an appropriate place for it.



For the second room, I've done the mesh for the floor that includes a platform that hides a pit with the surgical chair in it. It was fairly simple but I've tried to add some details from the references to make it as interesting as it can get.



After the great feedback received, we've all continued to work hard and start to get some great quality assets in the scene. I've done a human skull that I'm very pleased with. At first I was very conscious about the poly count and made it visibly low poly and faceted, but with the feedback and help of one of the tutors, Tom, I've redone the final version to about 5k polys. It looks way better now and there texturing helps to take it to the next level.




Next week I'm planning to block out the rest of my assets from the list and once that's done, i might have some time left to experiment with some advanced material setups for the use of detail normals, slice masks for the props and material blending for tiling materials.

Luke:

This week i finished texturing the crate, and the jug then moved onto some of the smaller assets as i finished my top priority assets, i created the medical trolley, mortar and pestle as well as the distilling device in Maya. should Finnish texturing all of these by Monday afternoon.

Shay:

I spent the beginning of this week making sure there was no grey left in the environment so it was ready for when Sony came. I did a quick pass on the wooden floor and walls and also the plaster. The rest of the week I updated the floor material so it was better quality I also added geometry so it didn't look super flat. Hopefully by Monday they will both be added into the scene

Tom:

25/11/2019 - I started refining the valve puzzle so it would fit Kyran's container design more, luckily this only meant I had to place the valves manually rather than dynamically, something I should learn to do more often rather than just trying to make something more clean. I then made sure the wheels would spring return in a combination pattern.

26/11/2019 - Final day before the Sony presentation, I did a rush to finish the game sequence and get a good game flow working, so that the player could start and finish the game. This involved implementing the rising theatre platform, the key inside and the final lock. I also moved all objects out of the main level into their respective levels. My final changes before submission were making the chair swivel and opening the vampire survival toolkit

27/11/2019 - Presentation day, we did very well, Sony seemed quite impressed with our blockout and there were no hitches, except the first puzzle being difficult to interact with. Certainly due to the nature of the valve and how a person would usually open them. I also started modelling! My first asset for this project (and maybe even my last, due to the massive amount of work piling up on the programming side of things) the 19th century gramophone.

28/11/2019 - Finished modelling the gramophone today, the object didn't need a high poly, so I was quite lucky on that end. I also finished UVing and started texturing it too. I'll be posting some pictures soon on it.


Our next milestone:

The next milestone for the team is to be met two weeks from now: the first room (lab room) should feel to a fleshed out/ somewhat finished standard by this point. I think with the size of the team this is a very achievable milestone to be met. We will be doing end of weeks review every week for the rest of the project to ensure we are meeting our milestones.

Summary of the week:

To round of this blog to a conclusion; I would like to stress that the team has worked very hard over the course of the week leading up to the presentation and even into the starting of full scale production.

Week 2: Getting started with production time!

This week has been really interesting and challenging for the team; We've in essence had this week and the start of next week to have a playable blockout in VR from start to finish, this is for our presentation next week to Sony.

We also had three new members join our team; Viktor, Shay and Luke. It's really awesome to have a slightly larger team now; with a larger team we can schedule in more props to make and it also helps spread the work out more, so when referring to the asset list we've added a total of around 30 additional props we can make, however, it still only uses 70% of the overall time we have to make the our project. This way we have comfort space for if things go wrong, as well as areas we can close off from players which will help reduce the amount of work required to complete the project if we start to run out of time. Yet, saying this the team is running at a good pace, with this here is everyone's weekly updates:


Hannah:

Inspired after visiting the Old Operating Theater at London Bridge we were more aware of how to improve our scene aesthetics, props and set dressing. It was impressive how close it was to what we wanted to achieve so we took even more influence from this space.
Being biased to the subject matter I focused on the types of pots and containers as well as what kind of foliage they had lying around. 





 



This meant the Art Bible had a mini over haul! This was good as we had 3 extra team members join us and we now had plenty of assets to evenly distribute among the new team dynamic to keep everyone busy.

Finally I also got around to finishing my Pots to be scattered throughout the scene. These were treated like bench mark assets in terms of detail and their use in storytelling. I've kept all 4 on the same texture map and although they have labels blank I'm planning to use decals for extra text for things like names of people, plants and liquids. For now they will remain bare until I make this decal and test if it works.




Also squeezing in some last minute journals to add to the desk! Ready for UVing...



Willow:

This week has been a lot of back and fourth with different lighting scenarios. I have been focusing on trying to balance the progression between the blue/green tones with the yellow ones. This can be tricky because with out the right balance this can just become a sickly green tone throughout. Which is not desirable! I fixed this issue by focusing on balancing a correct colour temp Vs a colour tone. I have also been working on trying to everything in the environment lit while maintaining the correct mood and avoid any early performance issues. This involved deleting the directional light after having used it to establish the original light direction. This allows us more use of movable and stationary lights over just pure static lighting.
To start work on fixing the shadows in the environment I have been going through light map density and light maps and altering where needed.
This week I also begun work on the dust particles. I didn't want these to look like simple flying dots and kept this in mind throughout the process. By adding a level of complexity that allows the dust to have depth fade I have also stopped the player from being able to walk into the particle. I have also controlled how strong the emissive of the dust will be when close the light by referencing the light location in the environment. Overall creating a more realistic feel.


 Surgical Theatre lighting Lab room lighting Dust Particles


Joseph:

We Visited the Old operating theater this week, we gathered a huge amount of reference images which already are helping with the production. I have since finished the modelling and UVing of the benchmark and have started refining my textures. its already at a good space so i will see how it goes. Apart from that I've given the necessary feedback to my fellow teammates and all is going well.

We also received 3 new members to the team. Luke, Shay and Viktor. All great additions and hopefully we can further our development with the extra hands. They are already contributing to the scene, Viktor has reconstructed the scenes frames, Shay's created a great looking floor texture. Luke is already creating scene populating props.


all in all, I'm looking forward to the Sony presentation day. and well done to the team.



Kevin:

This week I focus get my chair to be ready to put in VR although my asset was not focal point, my group wanted us try go through all our assets on list be created and have base colour to be s populated in scene.



Chris:

It has been a pretty productive week so I'm pretty happy with that.
The first thing that I managed to finish was the ceramic tile texture that i started on last week; I managed to get it to a point that both myself and the team was happy with. The variation in of the tiles is subtle enough to not look repetitive whilst also having visual interest. I had initially added wearing and dirt to the texture but as this a lived-in environment that is maintained, those details weren't as necessary so the details were made subtler.

After this I moved onto one of the more functional aspects of the scene that will be one of the Escape rooms puzzles; the levers. Modelling is what I'm most comfortable with so it was god to get back to what I know best. For the moment, we only need to worry about getting a functional block out together so once the model was done only a basic colour pass was necessary to add before implementing it into the scene.


The third and final thing I managed to complete this week was a bookshelf. This bookshelf is going to contain a false book that will open the door to the next room, so the model shouldn't be too simple. After looking at some reference for late Victorian bookshelves, I settled on two designs that I combined into one model which I'm very happy with since despite it's fairly basic shape it also comes across as quite grand and elegant. Like the levers, the bookshelf only needs a simple texture for now which i will quickly do next week before the presentation.

Thomas:

18/11/2019: Today I finally finished playing around with the low level handle mechanics inside the Interaction Master. Thanks to Juriaan's incredible help, I've moved closer towards understanding his base code. I've also made the small cabinet doors on Kyran's shelves intractable. Coding the first lever puzzle should run a little more smoothly now, assuming I would know what to reference once Event Control has been fired.



19/11/2019: Finished the first puzzle mechanics puzzle, the lever combination. Right now, the combination is randomly shuffled every time you hit play, but one could set the combination to anything the artists desire. The code is all in the BP_Spawner, which will be renamed to BP_LeverPuzzle. The Blueprint finds the first index to the BP_Handle class (which will be renamed to BP_Lever, and hopefully that will be the only lever object we will have in the scene) and duplicates it the number of times the artist specifies. It will then generate a code dependent on the amount of levers provided. Tomorrow, I will be working on the wheel puzzle.



20/11/2019: Managed to finish the first pass for the wheel mechanic, the variables stored get into an array that deletes the first index of a 5 item array when it gets to 5. I then retopologised Jo's cross model



21/11/2019: Finished the new valve mechanism that was suggested today, and implemented the levers into the scene

Urim:

This has been a busy week for all of us. Trying to get benchmark assets complete with a playable game from start to finish by next week for the Sony presentation. My role has been quite intense in terms of creating the environment as modularly as possible. The first couple of days, I spent time working on the theater room and getting that out of the blockout stage. I started with the walls, roof, and the skylight. I got them to a high standard and added a basic smart material so I can show the type of look and feel I want to go for. I then worked on the door mechanism and making sure that was done correctly without any restrictions and I did run into quite a few problems. Having a door turn from the centre pivot point was quite tricky to make sure it was done right. The UVs played a part as I wanted it to tile over to the wall as well and make it look like a seamless transition between them so the player won't notice any suspicious entrance there. I left the textures of the inner parts, which will be metal, till later as the model will be open to change in a couple of days once the wall texture is complete.

Lastly, I managed to start with the seating area and making sure that is up to a high blockout standard with basic materials by next week. I had a few issues with making them snap together but I managed to fix this by making the whole curve as one object with EP curve tool, and then the doors and the corner piece as a separate object without any notice. The next few days will be quite packed in terms of what I need to do by Wednesday which is making sure the whole seating area is completely modelled and UV'd at least.

Kyran:

This week has been a really busy week for myself. I've made a few different assets for the game environment; simply trying to get some good first passes on some key featured items in the environment so that we can quickly understand the setting and feeling of the environment that the player will be in. This week I've worked on cabinets that can be opened and closed in VR, a set of drawers that can be used in a modular way through the scene, and I also started working on the stasis chamber! This is where the player starts; trapped inside, in need of escaping. Due to the size of this asset, it requires a lot of work; setting up a modular piping system saved loads of time, and has given the opportunity for us to use this modular pipe system around the scene if we want to fill up some space in the environment. I have however come into a few problems with the stasis chamber based around material usage; due to the sheer size of the object and the fact the player will be inside of the chamber. It requires a very good texture quality. So far I've managed to pack it into 3 materials (Exterior, interior, and modular pipes) However, if we want a glass panel we could hit an issue of an additional material just for the glass piece, a simple solution would be to create a bars instead of glass, then bars could simply fit onto one of the other materials. Next, i'll be working on this asset, discussing with the team about the materials and getting a high poly sculpt over the welds etc in Zbrush to add the extra layer of detail.

Lastly, for the start of next week i'm going to make sure that we're on track with the work that's being produced, and that everything is ready for the Sony presentation.  

 Stasis chamber progress image

 In engine screenshot of cabinets

 modular draws

Adrian:

This weekly I mainly work on the work bench/table that will probably have a lots jars and set dressing items on it.

I made a low poly in maya, then put the model into Zbrush, to give the surface edges more of a natural used look.

One of the thing I dont like about modelling in maya is that the edges of surfaces can look overly uniform and perfect. Which great if you want clean edges and straight lines (which unfortunately can cause aliasing issues in the game engine).

Maya does have sculpting tools but, they are nowhere near that of the robustness and functionality of Zbrush.

One of the other reasons why I decided to put the table in for a zbrush pass is due to the fact it a pretty big prop in the environment. So having a lot of surface and edge undulating helps to give the table character and make it look more organic (well thats whay I hoping the end result will look like in the scene).

After I finished giving the table zbrush treatment, I took the decimated version back into maya to start retopologise it.

I used Maya 2018 because what im familiar with, I learned half way through the retopo that maya 2019 has a new auto-retopology functionality. Which I will try out on other props that I will be making.

During the retopology phase I realised I had made an assumption, that made the process of making this prop little long winded and give me self more work to do.

I treated every component of the table as a unique and discrete object. When really I should modelled the key features components and duplicated items like beams/ legs and rotated them and reused them. Which looking back now seem a little silly and not very time effective.

Once I finished retopology, I uv'ed the model. I decide to keep the texel density uniform across the whole object. I was a little concerned about the quality of the texture as it is a pretty big object in the environment and the player can get very close to it.

So I decided that moving the underside of the table and the inside of the draw uv shells to outside of 0 - 1 UV space but snapped 1 to the right sitting over the top of the table UV shell. Would help save UV space and increase the overall texel density.

My rationale for this was that although it can potentially cause bake/AO errors, the reality is that the player will never really see it clearly as the player would have to get on all fours to look under the table, plus the underside of the table will be in shadow obscuring it.

I am currently work in the chandelier for the main chamber.

Shay:

This week I mostly focused on the wooden flooring. Feedback from the team really helped. I think I got it to a good level for Sony but there are still some things I want to add, also I still need to see how it looks in VR. For next week I have the wooden wall and the plaster wall to do. 

To summarise the week, everyone has been working really hard to have a good blockout scene to present next week. Once our presentation is done, we will be running a full production sprint for the next few weeks after up until the Christmas holidays. In this time we should have the first room to a near finished standard.