Work-wise, my priority over Easter was split between this
and improving the diorama project. With that in mind I did not progress an
awful lot but the changes I did make were important ones.
I created the lake using a combination of a couple of
different tutorials and a lot of additional tweaking. One of the tutorials was
quite complex and possibly more than is needed for my lighting conditions so I
may go back and remove some sections. The waterfall itself required less
tweaking but the addition of more textures layered over the top to add
movement. I actually sculpted and baked the waterfall but it isn’t very visible.
To mask the seam between the waterfall and lake, and add some realism, I
created a few particle systems for foam and splashes. Changes I’m considering
making include adding more foam to the waterfall, and continuing to turn down
the metalness.
The other change was that I finally created the skybox. This
involved a program called SpaceScape where you create layers and play around
with variables to create nebulas. I tried to use it without a tutorial but
wasn’t at all happy with the result so I tried again with one, and then made
changes and duplicated layers to turn it into what I wanted. I then had to use
the Nvidia texture tools to stitch the six renders together to make the cubemap
compatible with UE4. This is where I hit a snag, as the way the sky sphere
worked meant the texture couldn’t be rotated. All I could do was keep returning
to Photoshop, roatating and switching around the six sides and re-saving,
hoping I had done everything correctly. The current view of the skybox in game
was the best position I could do.
Week 11
The first day back I spent modelling small assets and trying
to fix the lightmap issues I was having. I managed to improve the problem, but
not make it go away.
The next day I decided to tackle something different for a
change, animating the Orrery. I used bones for each planet’s orbit, their
holographic rotation and their holographic annotations. It didn’t take an awful
lot of playing around to work out how to get the bones linked up the way I
wanted, but once I was done making it animate correctly was tricky. I’d set the
main bones up so that their axis matched up with the orbits would follow, but
the animation seemed to scoop, moving more horizontally before realigning
upwards or downwards towards the keyframe location. This meant if I only used
the start and end keyframes they rotated only on the horizontal instead of
around their orbits. It turned out I needed to tell the keyframes what axis to
prioritise to fix this. The holographic signs I had to set to not have their
rotation affected by the bones they were linked to so that they would always
face forward.
The real problem arose when the animation I imported didn’t
match what was in Max. My first import had the planets and their labels
rotating in place on a strange axis. This I fixed by selecting the ‘Resample
All’ checkbox. Then all bones were having an effect, but the planets were yet
again only rotating horizontally. Eventually I worked out that I had to go back
to Max and lock all the variables that weren’t being animated. I don’t
understand why exactly this worked but now I know for the future.
For the rest of the week I continued working on the small
assets to add character to the interior. The aim was to fit them all onto the
one sheet with the weather station. I’d had ideas already about what small
assets to make but once I had used up all the most suitable ideas I was still
left with some gaps on the UV map, so I spent extra time thinking of even more
generic assets such as coasters.
