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