Over the course of this week I have continued to work on asset creation, texturing the walls I started last week. The building is assembled from several different sizes of wall assets to allow for a more interesting layout. To keep the scene optimized I want to be economic with my texture use where possible during this project, in that vein, all of my wall assets are fully textured with just 3 materials instances. To achieve this without sacrificing texture fidelity the UV shells were stacked on top of each other in the UV map. However, this does mean that each element is textured identically leading to some repetition. I think this could be crunched down further but I am concerned about the walls becoming overly repetitious as a result.
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| Various wall assets rendered in the engine. |
Alongside the walls assets, I also generated a couple of assets for inside the building these assets were the hammock, steps and bookcase. These were assets I knew I wanted in the scene but I did not estimate to be too time-consuming so they fitted well into my schedule for this week. Just like with the walls the steps UV shells were stacked on top of each other, due to the shape of the shells this left about half the UV map empty. I looked at a couple of options and elected to unwrap the metal elements of the hammock onto the second half of the UV map, again to minimize texture usage. The hammocks cloth takes advantage of Unreal Engine 4s cloth simulation. This did require the cloth be assigned as a separate element to the rest of the mesh and that the asset be imported as a "Skeletal Mesh" instead of the "Static Mesh" that all my assets had been up till now. For texturing the hammock I also created a rope material within Substance Designer for the cord, I intend to use this material later on as well.
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| Graph and render of the rope material in Substance Designer. |
Satish Shewhorak raised concerns with the roof of my building, felling it inappropriate for the style of building and positing it gave off a naval vibe. After talking with him about it during our Tuesday session I came to agree with him and looked into an alternative roof. I settled on extending the existing roof up to a point and filling the new cavity with a giant skull of a monster as a type of trophy. This feels thematically consistent and more visually interesting, though it does require alterations be made to my schedule to accommodate the new work. my original roof piece was designed to allow in as much light as possible to help keep the environment bright what now won't be possible. I've considered using another element from the game to help alleviate this, "scoutflies". Scoutflies mechanically serve as a guide for players in-game and are thematically a breed of insect similar in nature to fireflies. Chiefly they let off a noteworthy amount of light and are kept by players. My plan is to experiment with using the skull as a host for a scoutfly nest to have coloured light emanating from above the room. This could prove better lighting as it'll allow me to mix more colours into the environment.
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| Original roof design. |
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| New roof design. |
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