Week 25: Texturing

The entire of this week has been dedicated to texturing, with me either preparing assets for texturing or actually texturing them. Playing around with the various capabilities of PBR and practicing hand-painted textures has made the last week enjoyable, even if I am quite slow at texturing. We also had our reviews this week and I have some life drawing to show!

Texturing

The first house took me a while to complete, as the roughness and normal maps required a good amount of tweaking to get correct along with my low skill in hand-painted textures. Once I got the first house out of the way however the speed picked up.

House_1

As each house is only a single 512 it became quite a challenge to keep the same texture quality through-out, especially with the larger second house. Keeping the doors and windows on a separate 512 did help with texture space however. Not every thing was hand-painted, like the book roofs for example were textured with actual books from the library.

House_2

House_3

Below is the texture sheet for house_3 as an example. There is no metalness on this house as we're going for a handcrafted paper world and I combined the roughness of all the 3 houses into a single RGB sheet to save on resources, which is why the roughness looks a little funky.

House_3 texture sheets

Review

Our reviews this week gave us a quick overview of how we're doing  and it's good to know that I am doing okay, but there's still room for improvement. Here is my action list on the things that I need to improve.

In order to improve my overall quality of work I will look at existing material, preferably from industry as reference. I've already taken this into account with the hand-painted textures where I found plenty of reference and tutorials on pinterest. I will try and do this with all future assignments too, especially for topology.

The second thing to improve upon was my naming conventions for my various files. I've found a good starting point to change this with a blogpost from someone[1] within industry detailing the various names for different files. I have already pushed this onto my texturing files.

The final thing that was noted is my attention to detail, more specifically submitting all the necessary files for any given project. I had forgot to submit any of the reference gathering or research I did for the dichotomous duo project which hurt my mark severely. Luckily I posted a lot of it on this blog which clearly showed I had done it so I've been able to resubmit it. 

Life Drawing

At long last I finally have some of my life drawing from the second year on a digital format and here it is! I know there isn't much but I suppose it's better than nothing. The majority of these are 10 minute poses.

That's it for another term. Easter break has started and I'll be texturing, animating and essaying (?) in order to not fall behind with work. I do also plan on catching up with a few games I've missed, like Bayonetta 2.

Notes & References

[1] UE4 naming conventions from www.tomlooman.com

Week 24: Sweeping It Under The Rug

The same problem from last week with Blueprinting has followed me into this week too, I tried again on Monday and nothing had changed. So I am going to be honest, I've dropped it and moved onto more productive stuff, any more time spent on the UI Blueprint will just be wasted now.

I haven't just let the HUD hang in limbo though, that would be bad practice in my opinion, so I have come up with an alternative plan of action if no one else in the group can fix it which is to have tutorial pop ups explaining the controls instead.

Once I realized that the HUD was going no where I started working on the Main Menu design, where I created a quick concept to help get feedback from the group.

The concept was rough but the idea was liked, therefore I spent Tuesday and Wednesday making the menu for real. I had to recreate the original Alice's Adventure Underground book as the reference I had wasn't lit as nicely as I wanted. The creation of the title had to be done at home due to a lack of admin rights when it came to installing fonts when in studio, which was a bit of problem, and I still need to tweak the position of the "Wondering Lands" as it doesn't sit perfectly center.

Thursday morning I modeled the leaf piles I concepted, the ones that morph into a cat as the level progresses. The final model pile sits at 595 tris, the other 3 are below that as there's a lot less going on. It might look odd at the moment but I'm hoping it will look great when I texture it with alphas.

For the remainder of Thursday and Friday I started texturing! Something I have been wanting to do for a while. At the moment I have been tasked with creating the textures for the 3 houses I modeled a while back and as we are going for a hand-crafted kind of world that means I have to hand paint some textures; digital painting isn't my strongest area and neither is colour but I've given it my best. 

The house uses a 512 for the walls, roof and base, with another 512 for the windows and doors which is shared between the other 2 houses. At the moment I have only done the albedo for one house as it took me a while to find the correct style, but next week I should have all 3 PBR'ed up and complete, along with anything else I need to texture before the Easter Break.

Week 23: Blueprint Woes

Despite some wishful thinking, I was on UI duty all week. Ideally I wanted to mix it up with some modelling or texturing but unfortunately not and I was doomed to have my face smushed into blueprints for half the week. I have managed to get 90% of the UI working though, which is good.

Firstly a quick update on the Pause Menu. I mirrored over the bottom section to get an idea on how it would look having something in each corner and I preferred it, so at some point I will be making custom top corners. I also managed to get some animation into the menu, which I'll be exploring when the rest of the UI is more finalized.

My other time at the beginning of the week was designing the HUD element of our game, which is very minimal compared to most games. I'd even say we could get away without even having any HUD elements at all but I thought I should have a go at it. I wanted the HUD to be a reminder of the growth mechanic that will feature in our game, so I mocked up a few concepts and got feedback from the group.

The one thing that was picked up on was the overall size and position of the HUD, which I agreed with was a bit big. Originally my idea was to have the HUD in the bottom left but my initial concept did not look correct there. Using the feedback I made some iteration on my design.

This iteration was liked along with it sitting in the bottom left corner, so the next stage for me was to make this thing look pretty. While I was designing the various elements I began to iterate on the design again as I came to realize that the huge wedge probably wasn't needed and I could do something a lot more delicate with it. Below is the final version of the game HUD.

Staring at blueprints was my week from about mid-Tuesday onwards, trying to get the various UI elements to work how I want them. The Main Menu and Game Level are on 2 separate levels which has made certain aspects slightly easier. I'll upload screenshots of the blueprints I am using but any of them could change as this entire thing is still very much a WIP.

Main Menu

Main Menu Widget 

Game Level

Pause Menu - WIP

Pause Menu Widget

The biggest problem I can't figure out at the moment is that the HUD will follow the player back to the Main Menu screen and won't ever disappear when activated which is a huge problem as we want the HUD to be triggered in the level. I am slowly running out of options for solving this which is a bit of a worry.

I think I'll begin working on the Main Menu design next week as I feel I have exhausted myself out on Blueprinting for now. I never expected UI design to require this much blueprint knowledge so I am almost regretting choosing it as an option, I just wanted to make nice designs.

Week 22: UI

I survived the unwrapathon that I had dug myself into from last week. I only spent a day unwrapping, but it was one long day and I won't be letting the unwraps stack up again. I'm perfectly okay with unwrapping, just not a days worth of it. The rest of the week has had me doing some small amount of modelling and a large amount of UI stuff, which has been going surprisingly well until the last day or so.

I modelled the tree roots that we want poking out of the level, which caused me to play around with splines in 3DS Max and the Path Deform modifier as well. Any other modelling I have done has been me tweaking small things in my previous models and adding collision meshes into certain assets that will help test the level.

As this is my first time creating a UI in a game the earlier portions of my week were filled with experimentation in Unreal's UI designer were I had only really scratched the surface, as I am sure there are an unlimited amount of possibilities with this tool. As I became more comfortable with the editor I turned my focus to the design of the pause menu, the only reason I chose the Pause Menu is because parts of that are actually working at the moment. I did a rough concept before I started on the final design.

I wanted the design to reflect what we were trying to do with the actual game, an almost hand crafted UI with parts looking cut out and stuck together like a diorama. If I can figure out how to animate within the editor then I'll have the various sections fly in as the Pause Menu is loaded to really try and sell the handcrafted style I want.

The entire thing is still a work in progress at the moment and small errors keep popping up, but never the less I'm very pleased with the results so far. I spent about an hour trying to figure one small annoyance on Friday night that I have only just resolved while taking screenshots for this blog post. I wish I knew what I did differently within the last 10 minutes but I am not quite sure. Anyway, here's the hover state example for the buttons which are now working! *cough*

Next week I'll be doing anything that the groups needs me to do, which I imagine will either be texturing or some more modelling. If nothing pops up though I'll be continuing on with the design of the Pause Menu and moving on to the actual HUD of the game.