- 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.
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