Off the Map Part 9

The next part of the project was starting to see how the many trees I had made in engine would be placed, along with the extra foliage I had been making. This was combining the lighting, assets and engine together to create a scene and some good looking set pieces. This would be a long process and is still not near being finished especially as more assets are being made and new features introduced. Setting up each environment so it has its beauty shot is quite fun and testing how you can make the composition of a level read is quite an interesting task because the challenge with it being a game is the player has some control where to go and therefore what to look at.

This also takes a more refined design and concept and I think that any trouble I have with this will either be from technical problems or that there isn't enough of a concept for that scene. I will be making more concept shots for this project from now on. Starting with composition sketches and then working through to a polished piece. This shows that I have to do alot more concepts in my project and think more about how this will work in engine.

Off the Map part 8

The next major development in our project and group was when another member joined unexpectedly. This was quite an interesting development and we were happy for the extra manpower. Something we had to do now was get our new member up to speed on what was happening in our level and what direction we were going in. It was at this point I realised that with texturing being started that we really need to band together and remind ourselves of the exact style of the texturing for the project while making things crystal clear for our new member. 

And so i generated a style guide taking inspirations from many games we had already discussed and showing exactly what we were doing and how it would be achieved. I mainly used Bioshock infinite and dishonoured for texture examples of the texturing but the moods and themes given in Rayman Legends, Child of Light, Trine 2 and Ori were also still in our groups mind from the moodboard made earlier in the project.

I thought this would be a perfect time to practice this, experiment with changes in stlye and demonstrate what we want with a more unique tree asset I was making. This would be a older ash tree with more knotted roots. This would be another use of Zbrush but this time I would properly retopologize in 3DGun to get the most our of my sculpts normals and it produced much better results. It was also the first time using xnormal which again produces better results and faster.

The tree has been changed little from then by reducing the saturation of the bright red. When the lighting, foliage and  landscape is sculpted it also look much better.

Off the Map Part 7

With the trees I started with the trunk but after many attempts and iterations it still didn't look natural so I decided to take a break and make the leaves and branches which was a very similar process to making the ground foliage. The results of these parts went fine but as I was looking at branches I realised the way they split apart mirrored how a trunk should split and after a little digging I found out about how trees split using the fibbonacci sequence. This made me realise about how I should be doing alot more research in my projects to make sure I get a much better looking tree. The silhouettes of the trunks and modelled branches now looked much more natural.

I still hadn't cracked it yet with how the trees would be made so I still did many iterations. I was also realising when testing the trees at this point that I was putting too many planes of leaves on them and this was complete blocking any light getting through the tree creating this horrible contrast. The amount of planes would have to be removed on the next tree I would make. This situation also started making me think about how to generate the natural lighting in a forest in engine with light beams and dappled lights shining through the leaves which wasn't being achieved in the engine through just the sun lights.

I used a combination of post processing, extra directional lights that only cast light shafts and dappled lights would create a more natural setting where the light could bleed through the trees and faked bounce lights would generate an more natural ambience with deep pools of shadow where lights still don't hit. I wanted the lighting to be afternoon like so I tinted the lights orange but the shadows blue so it looked light the how light of the sun. This also generated the more Disney/Pixar look we wanted our project to have. I got lots of information on shadows and lighting from a Crytek GDC presentation and while there are tools in cryengine that are not in UE4 it still carried across. This shows again just how much research can go along way building upon the success of the trees. I have shared the information with quite a few people and this has greatly improved the work.

Off the Map Part 6

The next step in our project was to start planning what Alice was going to say as she moved. Through the world. We wanted to keep it close to the book so most of what she would say when reacting to her journey was pulled directly from the book or paraphrased to suit the way a game would be interpreted. We also wanted Alice to occasionally have conversations with the characters in wonderland as these episodic conversations are what makes the book so great.

This proved to be much more of a challenge then thought at first, because the book would be short on usable quotes to use in some areas and full of them in others. We wanted to ad some interactivity to the caterpillar conversation where Alice could choose multiple choice answers and the player could craft their own conversations with the angry insect. This was very hard because the book wasn't structured in that way so making it always seem like the possible answers are something that Alice would say. Once I put the basic structure of these conversation and most of the quotes and lines I could think of they were sent to other members of the group to expand upon and improve.

I then moved on to the next section of the project which was trees. This was something that I really started obsessing into doing many many iterations as I improved and learnt new software packages and workflows. I knew that it would take a while to get some nice looking trees and I would have to make quite a few because of the amount that would be in the game. Large sections of the game are forests and it is crucial that they look good. This would eventually be tackled in many different ways as I learnt how to improve the quality of my 3D in many different ways.

Off the Map Part 5

I haven't been posting for a while and its time to start catching up on the work I have been doing on the Off the Map project. So one of the things I have been learning to make and producing for our groups Off the Map has been foliage like grasses and flowers. This was an interesting process because it was expanding on things I had learnt about but didn't fully understand and utilize last year for the tree project.

I started by with grass before moving on to the flowers and other foliage but the workflow was simple once learnt and could be used on anything you wanted. I would start by actually modelling the grass blades. Making a cuboid and then modelling into it and extruding the vertical edges so that w=hen the model was turbo smooth there would be a crisp clear edge that could be baked in. I would then place the grass blades together all textured with a simple gradient material in 3DS Max and twist them so they looked like they naturally bent under the blades weight.

The next step was to bake them onto a plane with an AO, Normal and Diffuse map with an alpha channel with a little anti aliasing so there would be no bleed in the channel. This would create a clean clear alpha and little cleaning up would have to be done. To create a more clear crispness to the grass I overlayed a greyscale normal map onto the diffuse to add that crease down the centre of the blades.

This process would be repeated with the flowers where I would model and texture before baking an cleaning up. With the larger leaves of flowers I would make a subtle height map and AO for the veins in the leaves.

Once these textures were made I would place them in engine and use the two sided shading model in UE4.7 to get some clear subsurface scattering where the light shines through the blades.

The final step in the process was to simulate the wind across the grass. Even though the unreal engine has a simple grass wind node in the material editor I wanted something that looked much more natural then the results produced by it. I used a system that pans a normal map across the world space the grass is in creating a more natural wind that doesn't move the bottom of the grass as much or at all and creates occasional mexican waves in the grass like the wind in real life.