Week 3: Continuing the Film Room

Most of the new week has been spent continuing the film room project which has been going quit well actually. The group was UVW unwrapping and texturing the assets this week, as well as correcting the models smoothing groups, pivot points and other minor changes to the geometry. This is a long laborious process but what it is still fun to be continuously testing and adjusting the textures in UE4 to create that perfect looking PBR magical texture. It's quite hard and throughout this week I have struggled with texturing while trying to make sure that the group regularly stays communicating with informal scrums and constant feedback to ensure a high production quality. Something about that side of these projects has really intrigued me though because you get to see all the aspects of the project being made and help them come together rather then just going off and making some bits feeling like there is no real end goal.

The final shots of our assets in a scene, the lighting and textures still need changing.

We have finished all our textures on schedule and actually started the engine lighting steps early which means that on the last week all that will be happening is some engine testing, lighting and re-sizing. This leaves us open to chase some stretch goals which we set ourselves like making it a full playable level which we can take some beauty shots of for our blogs and portfolios hopefully. I'm going to be experimenting with Look Up Tables (LUTs), Fog (it may come in handy for our scene) and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) because we decided as a group that we wouldn't use up more time in creating ambient occlusion maps when the engine does a good chunk of the work already with PBR and SSAO can help give that natural shading look. As a secondary stretch goal, if I get the time and we make the level playable, I intend to put some ambient sounds into the background of the scene to add a level of immersion to the scene.

A quick paint over of the modeled assets helps with texturing and keeping ourselves focused on the colour palette of the room.

Another thing that I am happy about is that our group has been tying together really well as we have kept up a high work level and had some positive response during the presentation sessions as well as from fellow students which makes the hard work feel like it has been paying off. The key now is to not let it slow us down. Calum Bellis, who is fills our technical artist role (I geuss) has figured out how to change the camera in our engine so it looks much closer to the type of lens in our shot so we can get our renders to look very similar  to the final production 

Some examples of textured assets

As I continue this project I have grown concerned with with texturing abilities and have seen that I am definitely fallen behind in the 3D department of my education and should redouble my efforts to improve. My aim is to learn how to bake high to low poly models in 3DSMax by the end of this month as well as improve upon my knowledge of texturing as I feel like I don't fully understand how to get some of the finer details into the texture in a way that doesn't look bad (ie: crazy bumpmaps)

I have also continued with my side project to redo first year exercises on Sunday as a nice relaxing exercise. This week it was 2-Point.

              

                         It was quite windy today so I found it hard to keep the page flat so I kept it quite rough and loose.