Week 9

Once I had baked down the rocks from the previous week, I duplicated and exported halves of the larger rocks from different angles, as they would only be half visible with how I was going to position them and it saved on geometry. With all of them exported I set out to make the cliff face. The effect of them overlapping wasn’t perfect but it was passable. However, where the edges met grass it looked incredibly unnatural. First I tried out vertex painting, which was an improvement, especially at the top where the terrain became flat again. I knew I had to do more though, so I created another terrain texture based on the rocks to help things blend. This texture honestly looks pretty bad on large areas, but when put to its intended use of filling gaps and blending seams it’s quite successful.

I quickly made an overhanging piece of cliff that I then used vertex paint to blend into the terrain. This made a very slight improvement though they do look bad up close. I positioned clumps of grass on the edge to improve it slightly. I had to add random tufts between bits of rock too to add variance. It was clear the next step would be to create more foliage.

I spent a long time making heightmaps for a variety of leaf clumps on one texture sheet. After arranging a couple of plants I imported them into UE4 and they immediately made a lot of difference. I made quick but effective path lights for the staircase and with them and the plants it went from being one of my least favourite areas to something I liked. Arranging leaves on plants wasn’t the most mentally stimulating activity however so I decided to leave them for a while. None of these foliage assets have proper lightmaps yet, nor do the rocks and most other recently created assets, so they don’t look perfect in the screenshot below, of course I shall return to all this later.

I made the mesh and collision for the bridge. I do not consider it completely finished as the way it connects to the landing pad doesn’t yet look right. I used the same tileable texture as the metal parts of the main building to keep things consistent, as well as using the same mesh as the landing pad. I also made a base mesh for the patio out the front of the house. The stepping stones I actually sculpted to make them more convincing. This is looking to have been a waste of time, as in engine they don’t look that great. I’m not sure whether this is due to the vertex normals being wrong or not imported, as well as the noise I applied to them after sculpting not being baked down.

I worked out how to change the colours in the default blueprint for the skybox, but I found that making the glow around the horizon a stronger colour like in my original concepts caused the colours to clash. In the end I toned it down again, making it only marginally brighter than the default. I have yet to make the actual texture I want to use for the stars- I’m most likely going to end up having to use a free program called SpaceScape to generate my galaxy. Of course I can’t download this to the lab computers so I will probably do so over Easter when I am forced to work on my own machine.

The main priority at the moment is to create foliage and other assets that can be used to block off the areas the player shouldn’t be able to access, but I feel a little burnt out with the foliage right now so I have started work on the hanging chair in the corner of the lounge- the last of the larger interior assets. I have been worrying about overdraw the most so far but from what I have observed the any notable issues I see are caused by not baking the lightmaps. It might be interesting to go around deleting groups of assets with alpha channels to test out if there are improvements I should make.