Weeks Five and Six

--Week Five--

I began the week working on some foliage, baking down the grass I had made at the end of the previous week and modelling the branches for the trees. I baked down the tree branches too and arranged them the best I could in a tree shape, using planes cropped tight to the edges to try and prevent issues with overdraw. I’m not 100% satisfied with how these models look, as they are viewed from quite low down and therefore the planes are very visible. I decided to try and improve their look by editing the vertex normals.

I did this using Maya, by transferring the normals of another shape. This took a while since I hadn’t tried it before and there issues I hadn’t expected, but eventually I got it to work. The picture below shows the tree before and after I tried this technique- I think the effect is interesting but not much better as it is. I would like for the tree tops to appear darker since they are where the sharply shadowed planes are most noticeable. I almost certainly will revisit them.

The next asset I did some work on was the steps outside. I created a base mesh in Max which was composed of two pieces of stairway, and imported it to Zbrush. I sculpted it so it would resemble pieces of flagstone, which took a fair amount of time. I then used Zremesher to create a lower poly version. I wasn’t too happy with the efficiency of this however, so before I attempted any baking I cut out the main steps and replaced them with chamfered versions of the base mesh. This worked well since the steps themselves were fairly regular shaped, it was just the walls around them that needed more polys. However I’m not completely satisfied with the outcome, as when I imported the mesh into UE4 the normals didn’t look as convincing as I had hoped. This may be an issue I have to fix with the albedo. I would probably be needing to revisit them anyway due to how I plan for them to intersect with the ground.

At the end of the week I started making the landing pad, but I worried about the amount of time it was taking, and by the end of the day I decided I wanted to focus more on assets for the building’s interior. I had been working on the bed’s headboard to fill time here and there so that was the obvious starting point.

--Week Six--

I did toy with using a cloth modifier to create the bed’s duvet, but that wasn’t going to give the puffy look I wanted so my only option was to sculpt it from a base mesh made in Max. This turned out to be fairly simple, and I managed to make the fabric quite convincing. I textured it with dark colours decorated with a printed lace pattern that I drew by hand, using yellow to match the feature lighting in the headboard. The bedframe, headboard and bedside cabinets were combined together as one asset. With the lighting unbaked the asset looks quite appealing, with the yellow lighting from the headboard and subtle blue lighting from outside. However, when the lighting is baked the asset becomes quite difficult to see due to the dark colour, and the light from outside is no longer visible. This may be because I have tweaked the world settings and global post-process too much when trying to darken the exterior of the building, so I will need to revisit this later. Another issue I’m having is positioning the light in the bedroom so it appears to come from the headboard. Right now I am more concerned with ensuring I produce all the assets I need so this shall also be postponed.

It was at this stage I realised I had completely forgotten about collision on the assets I had made so far. I added checkboxes for both collision and lightmaps on my asset list so I wouldn’t end up forgetting about it until last minute. I then created collision for the main building. The whole structure is still one large asset, so the collision ended up being formed of over 40 boxes. This doesn’t seem to be a problem.

I then modelled three different kinds of door for the level- a front door, a balcony door and one for going between rooms (though I now realise I haven’t made wardrobe doors yet). Due to the house’s modern theming I was able to create them in a way that they only needed tileable textures. I used a tutorial to make blueprints for them. I had never worked with blueprints before in UE4 so I had problems with some pretty basic things, such as changing the base mesh and materials, but I worked things out eventually. An interesting extra stretch goal might be to make the door handles move when you use them, but any animation I try and utilise will be used on more important assets such as the orrery.

My final task of the week was making the seating. Due to their simple design I could use the cushions I made for the whitebox, so I modelled the frame off them and imported them into Zbrush. I just needed to sculpt the seams on and some subtle creases for realism so it didn’t take long. However, when I tried to bake them down in max I found that there was a lot of strongly visible noise. After playing around with the settings a bit I managed to decrease it, then I baked it out twice the size I was going to need so I could resize it down and decrease the noise further. The albedo I was originally create as a map but with the cushions each being one solid colour I decided it would be more efficient to make a tileable I could change colour and apply to each.  

Next week I will continue to create the main assets for the interior. I feel I should make some of the kitchen assets next to fill the room a little more.

Week 4 Summary

This week was a somewhat slow one, not least because of finally catching the cold that was going around.

After continuing to make tileable textures for the main building for a while, I started work on the satellite dish. The modelling didn’t take too long due to the simple shapes and the ability to use modifiers such as lattice to make the scaffold around the dish. However it did take a very long time to unwrap since I then had to unwrap each strut individually. There are currently a couple of small gaps in the UV map so it isn’t as efficient as it could be, but it is very likely I will add another smaller dish to the side of the structure that can then make use of that area.

Texturing the dish was difficult- the whole asset would almost entirely be made of the same material so I’d need to make it convincing. I spent a long time adding highlights and some subtle weathering but I’m still not happy with the result. Ideally I would be able to use a texturing program like those often used in the industry such as Substance Painter or Quixel Suite, but as I greatly prefer working in the labs I am presented with the problem of not being able to install programs on university machines. Substance Painter does bypass this by being accessible by steam, but it is a lot more expensive than Quixel, and does a lot less. I am going to try and speak to the lecturers to see if there is anything I can do.

At the end of the week I started making grass to bake down onto planes. We decided to do presentations among ourselves to see people’s progress and offer each other advice. I don’t think I conveyed the alien forest idea perfectly since a lot of suggestions were things like adding lots of moon dust, I could still use the idea of a crater or two to add interesting features. Other ideas included having glass that changes opacity rather than shutters, and shooting stars. They thought the texture on my satellite dish was good but needed work on the specular.

The tasks for next week will be to make foliage and revisit the main building to create a lightmap.