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.

Week 1: Pitching and starting production- The Beginning!

Finally, just like that the production for the project has begun! Over the course of the last few weeks my team and I have been tirelessly working hard to come up with some very cool and interesting Ideas for a VR project that is going to be mentored by Sony; We have been given a brief that requires us to create a visually rich themed environment, that is an 'escape the room' experience; Really excited for the weeks ahead and the exploration of this new medium. Our environment is 'Monster Hunter's Lab' we play a character that has been captured by monster hunters for live experimentation, you wake up before the experiments get going and the task is to escape the lab!

Read the following to find out more about each team members week for the project, this will be a weekly production blog so plenty of cool content to come.



Willow:

It has been the first few days of production and therefor super busy, but also super exciting!
As the lighting artist my main priority has been to get the basic colour and light into our blockout environment. I have been using a combination of yellow and green tones to compliment the age and nature of our project.

I have also begun some minor modelling; for example I have been modelling the light fixtures, I intend to use emissive textures for these, as this will be great in terms of optimisation and help further set the lighting tone for the environment. 

Hannah:

Most of my responsibilities so far has been related to the Art Bible. After our initial pitch I realised we were missing some key information such as what exactly does our key furniture look like? I spent the last of this week trying to fill in these blanks so that the rest of the team can get on with their work as fluidly as possible with minimum queries!

I did eventually get to some modelling, a variation of ceramic jars which the player will also be able to pick up and smash around the scene!

JPGs to follow 

Joseph:

So we've received our final idea after careful deliberation from our tutors and I've assumed role of Lead artist.

My Job is to make sure everyone is following the Art directors reference shown in the Artbible, relay corrections and errors that me and Hannah spot, while also providing assistance to any artist if they need help. In terms of What I've started this week, I have so far started work on a benchmark asset, the "Vampire Hunting Kit" to be precise. This piece will not only be made up of smaller less complex assets but its planned to be Intractable too on a basic level. So far the asset is about half way completed in the modelling stage. And Will most likely be finished by Sunday Where I will proceed to start texturing.


All in all I think we are starting strong as a group and communication is on point. daily stand-ups and real discussions, even rendezvous with my fellow leads enables us to truly understand where the project is heading. So I'm excited for the future.

   Box Open   Box Closed

Max:

This week I started off with doing the paint over of one of our original ideas “Grandpa’s Attic” which the tutors decided against, after that I started work on one of the quality benchmark assets that we will be presenting to Sony, the asset is the laboratory desk. I used reference gathered by Kevin and got to work modelling On Thursday and finished on Friday along with UV's. This has also now been implemented in engine to test the opening of the drawers as well as making sure the desk was the correct scale for the player.

Urim:

This week (11/11/19) we were preparing our art bibles to present to the tutors so that they can pick one of our ideas as the final one. We ended up with our monster hunter idea and I couldn't wait to start production. My main duty was to make sure we had all the modular pieces created for the Sony feedback presentation in the following 2 weeks. This included both rooms without any grey box in the scene. I managed to model and UV the first lab room modular kit and to be tested in the scene next week on Monday.

Kevin:

During this week was give numerous task such as looking for props, looking different vista for both ideas before Wednesday's presentation, after the presentation, we knew what idea that chosen by tutors.


I was giving tasks to be creating key factor model for our VR project by Tuesday

Chris:

This week I started on making a material within Substance Designer for a wall texture for the first room. Since our group doesn't have a specific material artist we're all going to have to chip in at some point to fill that roll, and in this instance the task falls to me to create a ceramic tile texture for the walls.
It had a while since I last used Substance Designer, but picking it back up again wasn't too much of a problem. So far I have a pretty decent start and it is already looking close to what I'm aiming for, it's just a case of making small tweaks to get the details right.

Adrian:

This week I added some pictures of props to the trello cards for the ideas. I added and rearranged some of the art bible slides. I generally did whatever tasks I was given which included but was not limited to.

I finished off the paint over of the office for the monster idea.

I was given the task to rearrange the colonial blockout to fit the reference picture. But struggled to find a definitive architectural design for what summed up Indian colonial design. I expressed the ambiguous reference pictures I was finding and lack of a coherent visual design to the lead, art director and producer of the project. Which they then decided to change the setting.

I'm currently working on making props (Table, Doctors bag & chandelier) for the project.

Tom:

14/11/2019: I organised the files to match the conventioned hierarchy, made sure everyone's workspace replicated the depot by right clicking the project files and hitting Clean... After that, I created a master material for the environment and prop materials folder and asked everyone to use an instance of that material when implementing textures. The material also comes with a tint option, this will make sure all textures will at least be coloured with something when the project is presented. I also implemented the very first detailed asset to the scene! This was Max Fitzgerald's desk, implementing it allowed us to monitor the scale on the headset, we found that, thanks to this observation and Jakub's earlier theory, all assets should be scaled up roughly 1.13 times from real world scale to make sense with the headset. Finally, I started implementing the pull mechanic to the desk drawers, this still needs work.
I also made sure to delete any remnants of the Grandpa's attic project, and named our project from VRTemplate.uproject to MonsterHunter.uproject
If there's still a grandpa's attic folder in your work space, that folder is empty, thus perforce didn't know it existed, you can delete it in file explorer


15/11/2019: Finalised the folder reorganisation and drawer mechanic for the lab. I also started prototyping the lever puzzle and delved into the VR toolkit's code to understand how some parts would work. Along with that, I've completed the master material for environments, this includes a scalar value to size the object's UVs appropriately. Kyran also pointed out that each time he opens Unreal, the perforce is logged on my account, which might be caused by a change in unreal's default file due to folder restructuring, this will be looked at.

Kyran:

This Week I have primarily been busy with starting up the production scheduling and asset organisation for the project; it is really exciting for me now that the project is under way but with as little of 35 working days available, we have a lot of work to do in that space of time, but with structured organisation and strong work ethic I believe the team is really capable of creating something great. Our next milestone is a Sony presentation coming up the the week after next and for that we have assigned tasks throughout the group so we can reach the requirements necessary for the presentation: We need 3 quality bench mark assets, a working playable blockout from start to finish (must be out of grey box), and with that our art bible presentation too! Whilst this is happening the rest of the team and I, have begun working through asset lists, so we can start populating the scene with some key feature assets quickly.
We also had someone from industry to come in and teach us about agile production, it was really cool talking to him and asking questions about production and how to best organise your work; he showed some really interesting methods through trello, that can be really good for the whole team to be involved with the production of work.

Lastly we have a schedule and asset list that has four milestones throughout the project; gotta keep track!

(a small section of the asset list)- Sorted by priority and calculated the amount of working days necessary to complete the project.

Overall, I'm really excited for the upcoming weeks with the team and to get really involved with the VR medium, for now we will be hard at work to reach our next milestone for the Sony blockout presentation- 27/11/2019