Theres only 1 week left until hand in an although I am reasonably confident having completed a fair amout this week Im still quite nervous for how much I still want to get done before submitting my FMP.
This week I was able to complete a lot more than I thought I would especially considering a lot of it was texturing. Over the weekend I managed to paint a tiling roof texture which I was going to use on the roof IDs of the filler asset buildings both the red original and blue contrast are ready to apply. I also painted the tiling heavy brick masonry texture I wanted to use to for the walls of the Cerberus gateway.
Starting on Monday I was able to complete the texture of the multi-use filler house and the tunnel asset which were both relatively easy generating some basic roughness and normal maps for it so it would match the rest of my environment with the exception of creating a devils pitch fork symbol to be carved into the key stone above the tunnel. Finally finished Alastor's Armoury as well. I created his sign-age late last week but it has all come together this well while finishing the rest of the texture maps.
Moving on to the problem child of the week Cerberus who was not playing ball. Still with the horrific lighting errors across his head with no explanation as to why this was happening I felt the only thing I could do was to go back into the max file create a second UV channel and stitch the UVs back together to form less noticeable seams hiding them on the roof of the skull or along a jaw line. I also changed the mip Gen settings within the texture to No mipmaps. From what I understand the use of mips compress the colours and can make your textures blurry in the process although its meant to aid the performance and reduce memory lost its sacrificing detail which I desperately need and so I turned this mip map setting off. This setting combined with needing to use stationary lighting within the level thanks to the static light never baking correctly, means I might lose some performance however my level is still running at around 80FPS. The lighting issues seems to be unique to me and unreal engine 4.8.3 it’s just terrible. Hours of digging into why this was happening and asking tutors revealed nothing even Craig took my level away and had a look at settings and there was nothing to explain this weird glitch. Guess I’m just lucky. I do seem to attract all the rogue problems no one else gets! Luckily my level is quite small so dynamically lighting such a space isn’t too costly on the performance front. Below you can see the difference in the light maps the auto generate one upon importing the model into Ue4 and my compromise to fix the stripy lines. Thank God I was able to find a fix for this!
Over the weekend I was also able to produce a poster to fit into the display of the free standing sign that occupies a corner. To the left is the original poster but in order to get it to fit with the theme I needed to rough it up and dirty it up a bit. The poster in game is to the right. I really happy with the texture of the free standing sign. The painted wood appears scuffed and worn but the detail of the screws holding it together are still visible.
On Friday I felt the time had come to add some fog into the level to build on the atmosphere and mood. Unreal has a fog generator built in but there are 2 types depending on what you will be using it for. One is atmospheric fog which is a general fog that can be added to any size level but will mostly fog in the distance not so much close to the player. The other is Exponential height fog which is much more customisable. The issue I had with just atmospheric fog was it was blurring the colours of my sky and wasn’t creating fog in the centre of the level which is where I needed it to be. Changing the height of Height Exponential fog and upping the density gave me the result I wanted. I feel it could with a little more but I don’t want to block out the level assets with fog because that’s not the atmosphere Im trying to create. What I want is some ground hugging fog to lurk around as you play the level. Perhaps that can be done with a particle system? I’ll look into it next week.
I will admit that throughout this week I have been adjusting the lighting constantly worrying that my level is much too dark. After showing it to a few people plus Craig, the suggestion was made to really draw attention to the fountain, up lighting should be used emanating from the drains. That way the light would catch the plants roughness maps and make it seem more alive. This change the look of the fountain dramatically and made it much more of a focal point for the players attention. I also created a flickering emissive material that could be used in the lanterns and windows dotted throughout the level. This was much more complex than I thought it would be. I also made a static version as too many flickering lights may be over powering in the level. Unfortunately due to my lighting glitch the material couldn’t light the area around where the material is placed and so I needed to build yet more stationary lights to light the area around the material. Unfortunately couldn’t get the flickering light blue print to work how I wanted it too. The material would flicker out of sync with the stationary light so I am majorly disappointed that around the flickering material the lights stay constant. Kind of ruins the effect. I am hoping to fix that either next week or before degree show. Very happy with how much I achieved this week. 1 week to go !!!