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!
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