Week 14

This week was shorter than usual due to a bank holiday on the Monday. Since there were three weeks left to the project the priority was to ensure I had everything that was already in engine at a passable standard, just so I wouldn’t have to worry at the end.

The cupboards had had fairly little work put into them, and the ladder- one of the main features of the asset- hadn’t been made at all. I fixed this quite quickly, deciding that any additions from this point onward could probably be unwrapped to a separate texture sheet, so I got the lightmap made and out of the way.

I then returned to the matter of the platform. Due to some strange errors I has having I couldn’t have light shining out of the edges of it and reflecting on the floor, as the floor was not showing any lights I added. The change I made to make up for this was to have the lights below the edge shining upwards, with a border added around this to disguise where the light would hit the floor. This worked surprisingly well.

I put a window frame in the skylight to add some detail to the hallway, as well as making some lights to brighten and add interest. I made them ring shaped to go with the lights around the platform.

It was difficult now having so many lights in the scene, as Unreal doesn’t let you have more than four baked lights interfering with each other. Fortunately there were only a couple of errors, and I could see the overlapping attenuation radii by setting the viewport to display lighting complexity. The only really visible change I had to make was removing one of the lights from the patio, but having both lighting and foliage coming from the ground up against the wall was unlikely to look the way I intended anyway.

Another outlying job was to add cables to the lamp and weather station, and make something for the orrery’s cables to go into. This was quite simple, and the generator I made didn’t need too much texturing work to look convincing due to being so small.

My favourite achievement of the week was making a force field above the living room. I had to create a material that contained a variable, then a matinee that controlled that variable within a small time frame. When the matinee would play had to be controlled in the level blueprint, so I decided to use a trigger box. This part was quite easy as I had experimented with object-oriented programming before.

I had originally started making the material by modifying a duplicate of the basic glass material included with the editor as I was going to have the glass and forcefield all in one, but I was having some trouble with re-importing the building shell at the time. In the end I made the shield as a separate mesh and deleted all the refraction inputs that had made it glass like as they weren’t necessary. The pattern that appears as the shield disappears I made by combining a basic gradient texture and another texture of a simple hexagon mesh. I gave this mesh a blurred edge so that the mask would change as the variable changed. Adding the glowing edges as the mask transitioned was simple as it involved duplicating the existing mask and changing the value at which it was opaque just slightly to offset it.  To get the animation looking its best, I was sure to have the UVs of the forcefield mesh mirrored down the centre, and that this seam would line up perfectly with the hexagon pattern.

As a final quick task for the week I made blinds for the bedroom, to add a little more detail and realism.