Sony Review:
Sony made a return to the class to review all the projects and give some incredibly constructive criticism on how to complete the projects to their fullest potential. There was a lot of points to go through but I'm going to quickly summarise the main things they raised with us:
.General Roughness- There seemed to be a very general roughness around all the projects, VR has proven to really null out the impact of roughness values so exaggerating them could really help this.
.The Second Room- The surgery room at the moment seems to lack that impacting 'WOW' factor. So directing the primary focus over the next few weeks to complete the second room to a very high standard will be of the highest priority.
.The stasis chamber- Requires some big attention over the next few weeks. In essence it's a room in itself, A huge task for completion. Taking on the feedback it's having some nice redesigning that I personally feel will have a much bigger impressive impact in the long run.
.The first Room- They Loved it! This was great to hear as to start with we had massive troubles with composition layouts and all sorts. It feels very coherent to them, in the way it's set dressed and populated which is great. Knowing this and the few little tweak they pointed out, we can really drive forwards with the second room without having major concerns for the first room.
All the leads after this sat down together and made a plan moving forwards for the next 2 weeks. setting mini sprints for everyone to follow with a week to reach.
Kyran:
The last two weeks have been really interesting and we have seen a big push forwards with the project to say the least which is fantastic. Iv'e done a variety of jobs over the past 2 weeks; in approach to the Sony presentation. This includes assets as well as managing the production plan for the next 2 weeks alongside the two other leads. Based on our Sony review we've been guided to primarily focus on the second rooms impact and giving it the same quality that stands in the first room. Myself, Hannah and Josepf, sat down after the meeting to create a plan that will reach and realise our goals with the project; to summarise the meeting we came to the conclusive agreement that 2 short sprints (of one week each) With overall goals as the weekly tasks. and little daily tasks to go on the white board every morning that are the ingredients made up for completing the project.
Fuse Box-
I was tasked with creating a fuse box for the lab room; this helps support the nature of the room as a secret lab and the great big stasis chamber. Due to all the little fiddly pieces inside the box the mesh itself is relatively high poly, but only if you put your face to it. Using LOD's I've been able to take control of the poly count from set distances. I tested his in game, and it isn't running out of frame meaning it's being efficient even for VR.
Drawers-
I had some trouble with the drawers recently. Trying to find the right wood saturation and colour was tricky. Once in VR it was even making the roughness variation even more flat. So I went back and refined the texture pass to push the quality to where it needed to be, and I re designed the labels to be more clear, as there was a slight drop shadow on the text which actually made the texture look very low in resolution. Now the texture pass is much more refined with better roughness and overall quality of texture.
BookShelf-
We had a rather large bookshelf in our environment which we use as a secret passage to pass through to the second room. However, due to the size of the bookshelf and how it was UV'd it wasn't reaching a high quality that we was looking for. So I took over on this from Chris to take what he had already made and just tweak it to give it an extra push in resolution and overall look.
Using the references, I had added back panelling to the bookcase, this is just simply pushing the visual interest of the bookcase. To solve the texture resolution, I made separate pieces of the bookcase and reused them; this means each piece had more resolution in the texture.
Sony gave some feedback on the bookcase, it feels very empty at the moment so getting some set dressing on it could really help, but it needs a further push which i'm looking to get onto next week.
Glass material-
A while ago I set up a glass material that wasn't necessarily working massively well. So Taking some time to improve this has been beneficial to all glass in the scene, It's now set up with parameters to control grunge and roughness values based around a custom grunge mask. The colour, alpha threshold, and roughness of the glass can all be played with in the material instances.
Exit Door-
We need a final door to exit through. As it stands I've been sculpting the door with some nice ornate features. Next week I'll be quad drawing , texturing and implementing the exit door; as it stands we just have a place holding mesh so it will be my highest priority over Monday and Tuesday to complete the task.
Hannah:
Returning from Christmas break I was sick during our reading week but that did mean I was able to finalise a bunch of stuff that was bugging me. Namely my last little bits of foliage. I now have a little bundle of dried wolfsbane which after talking to our foliage specialist teacher at college made me realise how easy this could be! I've been so worried about using excessive transparency that I've been making my foliage too high poly and this isn't needed at all. As such this was turned around super quick in the end!
When we were back in full attendance in class I've spent the last week touching base with everyone in the team, reworking responsibilities of everyone with Kyran and starting to really nail down exactly what we need to finish our scene.
This combined with our over all positive feedback from Sony, there are some major changes that needed to happen but this is all good as it references closer to our original ideas. Seriously taking in on our feedback I'm asking for some assets to have more prominent use of leather, change the direction of our main light source to where it was originally, and making sure our wood carries the same level of quality throughout.
I've spent this week also set dressing the surgical theatre more and with the team focusing on this area it will come together very quickly. Urim and I were also trying to work out if we could create a secret corridor from one room to the other using assets we already had but after a lot of debate we feel like it's going to be too much of a stretch with the time we currently have left and doesn't necessarily have the impact we are looking for.
Willow:
Willow has been incredibly hard at work this week with her lighting, after the Sony presentation getting advised to make a big change was certainly a task in itself but the way it has been tackled in super impressive and benefiting the dynamic of the scene massively!
Before Sony Feedback:
After Sony Feedback:
Josepf:
Well, we return for the last 3 weeks of intense work. I have been granted the great honour of further refining the Stasis chamber. We had the meeting with Sony and they were impressed, primarily with the first room. from the composition to the assets they thought it was done to a great standard with certain things like trims and roughness maps being the criticisms that stood out the most. the second room however had more glaring faults that needed attention. further overall refinement is needed and that is what our final 2 weeks of "sprints" will be focused on. Already the room is changing with new textures and lighting adjustments, and it is looking better already.
we are flirting with the idea of breaking up the traversal between rooms by adding a corridor to allow us to deliver more optimisation for the rooms by using the corridor as the catalyst for the level streaming. allowing us to push more polys and higher texture maps where they may be needed.
I have broken the Stasis chamber into the interior and exterior and the interior is taking priority. it has undergone a radical change and looks far more intricate and developed already, something that was missing. feedback is still being taken on board from me and Hannah to the rest of the group although we are pushing for more attention to be given to our Trello boards near these final weeks of development.
altogether. we have a lot to do, but it is doable especially with the quality of people we have and the number.
Chris:
Returning to the project after the Christmas break the last two weeks have been about refining the first room and adding anything that may have been missing.
For the first week back, I once again returned to the bookshelf as it still wasn't sitting right in the scene. I simplified the design in the hopes that there wouldn't need to be any more changes made in the future, however, as the team was still sure of how the bookshelf would open, the bookshelf would need to be revisited yet again. Because of this, the responsibilities of the bookshelf were passed to Kyran since he had a better understanding of what was happening to the bookshelf, and also so I could finally move onto something else.
The position of the levers in the scene had been decided, so my next line of work was to create a panel for the levers to sit on, rather than being directly bolted to the wall. This was a fairly simple model so it didn't take too long.
With Sony coming in once more on the Wednesday of the second week, the team suddenly realised that there was a corner of the room still in grey box and needed to be changed. because of this, I worked alongside Max to model and texture electrical components to replace the grey box. Thankfully this only took a day and was able to be implemented before the Sony presentation.
The remainder of this week has focused on finalising the textures for the electrical components since we only had time to give them a rough pass initially.
Max:
This week was very interesting for me, firstly I was able to make a very cool prop which I was excited for, the Victorian camera. It was both a challenge with modelling and texturing. It looks really good in the end and a nice portfolio piece. Other than this I spent the week doing tasks important but other people were unavailable to do, these improve the larger vision of the game and I’m happy to do that.
Urim:
During reading week I started working on the vomitorium exit and making sure I was able to start a new architectural design as the old one wasn't working. I had chats with some people and the tutor to see what would work best and we came up with a more simple design process that made more sense. I started working on this and it included creating stairs going downstairs to the exit with handrails on each side. I managed to complete all of it and add it to the game.
This following week I received some feedback on the walls of the vomitorium exit. The texture being wood throughout didn't make sense and it needed something to break it up. So I came to the conclusion that I needed to create a trim in the middle and add wood at the bottom with plaster on the other half. This made it more visually appealing.
There were some grey areas in the lab that needed completing before the Sony presentation. I had to make a small fence that broke up the scene in 3 different sections. I needed to focus on the design and making sure it can be more appealing than a simple block of wood. I managed to model and texture on time for the Sony presentation.
The sony presentation went very well, we received a lot of feedback to the point where we had to cut a lot of assets we wanted to create due to time. They really liked the lab area a lot with quite a few texture problems that needed fixing. In my end it was the fence, it needed to fit the wood beams more i.e. more wear and tear. The main criticism was the theater area. This area wasn't as fulfilling as the lab. There was a lot more work needed to be done in that room before the deadline. The theater stand area needed rework on the way the wood beam direction would go. So me and Viktor had discussions to see what best possible way would be to tackle this. During this problem, we wanted to test out the different ways we could change the transition between the lab and theater. I got set to make 3 different variations of a narrow corridor and test them out in VR to see if it would work. We came to the conclusion that neither corridor would fit best especially for the amount of work that was needed in the time left. Next week's goal would be to create wall trims in the theater area for a better appealing environment.
Adrian:
This is 3 Blog posts in one consisting of the week before/time during Christmas and the last two weeks that we have been back.
Before/during Christmas
Medical Bag
Made some minor tweaks to the bag from the previous week.
Animal Crate
Started in the last week before Christmas. Block out in Maya, then sculpted in Zbrush, back to (During and after Christmas) maya for retopo and finally substance painter for texturing (During and after Christmas)
New Year
Big Door
The first week back I got the pleasure of remodeling the big barn like door, which would in real life have a pulley system out side used to hoist large objects from street level to the top floor of the building.
We wanted the glass panels to be blackout with a little bit of light seepage, to imply the lighting conditions outside (by using a masked emissive texture). This is shown in blog pic 3, from the feed back I got from Hannah on Monday (this week), she felt if looked a little bit to stylised/cartoon. So I re-textured the door as can been seen in the bottom left hand corner of the picture.
Chalkboard - Hannah's picture (Artwork)
Finally I got to put some story telling elements on the standing chalk board, in this case Hannah's lovely chalk drawnings. See Blog pic 4
Handle, Chain and Lock
While modeling and texturing the door it never occurred to me that the door would need a handle, chain and lock. I assumed that it would have some kind of blocking metal bar or wood running across it. But I was told it would need handle, chain and lock so I rushed these to get them in the engine for Tuesday evening ready for the Sony play through and feedback (there texturing is very basic and need reworking).
I experimented with using planes with a tiling chain link to create the chain, but it looked very goofy/float-y and generally a pants. So I was told to make the chain out of a meshes to make it look proper in VR , give it weighty and prime beefy-ness (this can be seen in blog pic 3).
During the Sony play through they seemed to feel that the door was to big.
I am currently reworking the meshes of the all the assets, before the door and locking system were on two different UV space/materials and imported as separated meshes (This was done for speed just to get it done before it went into the game).
I am currently in the process of reworking the UV space and re-texturing. Which should be done on Saturday morning, after I will be moving on to redoing the Surgical cupboard in the theater.
Viktor:
Beams needed revisiting after plenty of feedback. As they had a totally new layout and very different sizes from the first iteration, I've redone everything from scratch and placed them in the scene manually which took a lot of time. 8 different beams altogether. The main issue was to be able to get consistent texel density on the really long beams while not using unique textures on everything and not using anything bigger than 2K. My solution after a day of testing and brainstorming was to have an unique Normal bake from the high poly mesh, an unique edge wear mask from substance painter and do the texturing with tiling textures in engine. On top of that for the very fine details, I've created a detail normal map in Substance Designer for the high frequency details, that I applied on top of the mesh with the help of a detail texture node in UE4. This method works really well and even the feedback from Sony included them withing the positive notes.
Shortly after finishing the beams, I've finished the sarcophagus, which needed a lot of sculpting work. If I'd have time, I should've manually re-topologised everything, but with the tight deadlines and the hand in date fast approaching, I had to save time by decimating and auto unwrapping the mesh.
Before the feedback session from Sony I only had time for one more asset, had to be something quick, so I've updated my barrel. The first iteration of the barrel which I quickly put together in just about an hour had serious issues with LOD flickering, so it required a brand new mesh and a totally new texture. Those were in game already for the presentation and look way better.
With all the fresh feedback, we have focused our attention mostly on the second part of the environment and I was shifted to the environment team to help with bigger scale assets. Currently working on the seating area for the surgical theatre.
Luke:
weekly update: remodelled, fixed geometry and pivot points for the bowls, distilling device and mortar and pestle, also removed the paper meshes from the medical trolley and updated the textures to add grease and edge wear, finished model for the scales yesterday evening, added everything else to the unreal scene and reimported the left over textures
Shay:
Before and during the Christmas holidays I spent time refining the geometry for the tiles so that they fit into the scene more. I also fixed the tilling issues I was having for it. On top of the the normal maps that came with the photogrammerty I created another normal to layer on top to catch the wood grains. I experimented with some decals using photos I took when I went to the operation theater.
The beginning of this week was spent wrapping up the wooden flooring wooden wall and geometry for the theater room for the Sony presentation. The feedback that I got from them was that the roughness values wasn't really showing in VR and was making it look flat. Also they said that the planks were way to wide and the normal map needed to be decreased. Since then I've reduced the normal map and made the wooden planks thinner. I've put the wood on hold at the moment as the materials in the theatre are much lower quality than the first room. I spent the remaining time of the week getting started on the floor tiles so they are completed before the end of the sprint.
This weekend i'm going to continue working on the metal slab and the flooring tiles.
Kevin:
I mostly focus on the texturing on mop and bucket in reading week as it time rap it up as I spent a lot of time on doing this
I started to model jar and crate in Maya on Monday with the high and low poly
I then late use Zbrush to have the detail of wood on high poly to bake onto a low poly crate frame.
Conclusion of the weeks blog:
Everything is starting to piece together really nicely which is fantastic to see! We have a few things to work on and refine over the next couple of weeks. However, with the organisation of the sprints and the sense of urgency within the group now, the scope is very achievable.
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