Week 10

This week’s work mostly consisted of tweaking existing assets and making small changes. The first couple of days involved sculpting and baking the hanging chair, which was pretty much problem-free apart from the backing to the seat cushions. Since the cushioning was made from a rough base I had to form the smooth back around it. Eventually I made something passable using Boolean functions.

I finished arranging the remaining leaf clumps into basic shapes so I could use them in the level. I returned to the others and made sure all had proper lightmaps and then added them to the foliage brush tool. The framerate wasn’t affected too much by bordering the upper area of the level, however the lighting isn’t fantastic. It isn’t as major since they aren’t supposed to blend into the ground like the grass is, but I might make them slightly emissive to match the trees better.

I also tweaked the bridge to an acceptable level and for texturing and for the lightmap. I gave the landing pad a lightmap, adjusted the chairs, made the table, and sculpted some smaller rocks.

I finally made the LODs for the main trees. I had to try and vaguely match the lighting in max then adjust the colours in photoshop to match the existing trees. I set them to be emissive and unlit so the colours wouldn’t be affected. I still need to cut down the planes they are on as there is a lot of alpha’d blank space that could potentially cause overdraw. I also changed one of the settings on the larger rocks and now they look miles better, though I can't say I'm done with them yet. I need to bake a better rock tilable for the terrain.

Current issues I am having:

-Spotlights are not baking down, their effects disappear upon bake

-Many lightmaps have suddenly become strangely pixelated and full of errors

-Grass planes don’t blend into grass terrain. Improved by keeping planes one-sided but not perfect.

At the end of the week it was revealed that we have an extra four weeks on this project. This makes having to work over Easter less of a worry as my home productivity is slightly less of an issue. I does mean I have the time to execute the more ambitious ideas I’d had for the project, such as a water feature. The shape of the cliff would work great with a waterfall, going under the landing pad bridge and into a possible lake filling the lower area. This would help fill the area a lot. I might need to try and work with shaders however to try and make the water’s edge convincing, which could be difficult.