Week 15

This was another week of small odd jobs.

I worked out how I had gotten past the “Degenerate Tangent Bases” issue on the main building shell the first time around, and was able to re-import it after fixing a couple of small issues such as unsmoothed surfaces.

It allowed to me to cut a hole for the large cupboard so it wouldn’t look like it were just pasted on. The cupboard itself didn’t take long to make as it was a very simple design, though I am undecided as to whether I should go back and add a handle.

I made some simple orange glowing lights to line the roof struts in the hopes that this would help sell the holographic shielding concept.

I spent a while sculpting a generic lump of fabric to fill some more space in the storage area. I put the normal normals on the same map as the seating cushions as there was an awful lot of free space. That made me feel a lot better about their efficiency.

I also made the books for the shelf. I only needed the outside covers to be modelled due to the angle they would be viewed from. In the UV space, I reduced the size of the front and back covers of all the books other than the ones at the ends of the piles, as any detail given to them would be hidden anyway. I decorated the spines with the alien lettering I had made up for the orrery.

I made some wardrobes to add realism to the bedroom. This was another simple asset I could texture with a tileable. Unfortunately I realised it didn’t make sense to have them line up with the back wall as then the bedside tables would get in the way of the doors opening, so I had to move them out a bit. I am not really happy with having to do this as I don’t think it looks as good. I may decide to change them.

The front of the house still needed a fair bit of work as there was no visible source of light and none of the plants I had made fit well between the house and the patio. I had to create a simple long tube light, as I couldn’t fit more than one light source in that area. In place of the plants I decided to create some ivy. I used a photo I had to get the leaves as I didn’t have any ideas when it came to making them look more alien. I arranged different planes of these leaves in a way that they would look like they were climbing up the wall, to add some interest to the blank surface.

Some other small tweaks I made near the end of the week included adding some metal trim to distinguish between the paneling below the balcony and the front panel, and changing the height of the Orrery to fit in where the newly added platform had reduced vertical space.

Finally, I got around to fixing collision so that the player wouldn’t be able to run through the trees out into nothingness. I added collision prisms to all of the rocks and trees, but anything placed with the foliage actor couldn’t use its collision. For this I had to manually add blocking volumes, so I ended up with a less accurate result but a more secure one. There are definitely no gaps the player could sneak through.

As an extra touch I used blueprints to make sure the player would automatically restart at the spawn point if they were to jump into the water. This also happens if the player presses enter, just in case they somehow get stuck. I wanted to try and have the whole level restart, so the shield matinee would reset on respawn, but I couldn’t work out how to do this as the events were on different blueprints and UE4 doesn’t support global variables.

By the end of the week I had a functioning level with no major lighting errors. There is still some polishing to be done, but all the major outlying tasks have been covered. I think the biggest issue I am seeing right now is the lack of detail on the walls, so I need to add some texture to them.