Week 30: Fixing Things

This week we had another deadline for an essay and any re-submissions, because of this peoples attention were more focused on getting other things finished than continuing on with the Off the Map project. While I didn't have to resubmit anything I did have the essay to do, but I still managed to work on the main assignment.

Towards the start of the week we had a presentation on our progress with the Off the Map project, there was plenty of good feedback given, most of which we knew about, like getting Alice into the level and finishing everything else. One critique that was said was about my piles of leaves, or how they looked more like a pile of sludge. Below is a reminder of the base mesh.

Old pile

It was recommended that the piles were redone and the transforming into a cat idea scrapped too, for simplicity sake. I agreed that the piles didn't look great and I knew something wasn't quite right about them. I am going to pin the blame on that I've been staring at them for a while now and I was blind to how wrong they looked until an outsider mentioned them. After the presentation was done I began to redo the leaf piles.

As there was only going to be 1 leaf pile now I increased the overall tri-count for the pile. Before each pile was around 400-600 but now the new one is just over 1000, but I think the increase is well worth it considering how much better the new model looks. I also had to redo the texture but that wasn't too much of a problem either and once we have a few particle effects going on the leaf pile will look fantastic!

New pile

The other thing I had to fix was the UI... again. I tried to get the "Restart Checkpoint" and "Restart Level" buttons to work this week but my blueprint knowledge let me down so I decided to remove both of the buttons. This meant the pause menu had to reworked ever so slightly.

Other than that I spent the rest of this week either doing the essay or just helping populate the level in Unreal. Next week will be back to working on this project full-time again, with everyone trying to get it finished for the deadline, including me. I'll leave this post with a painting I did over the weekend, I'm quite proud of it!

Digital, with reference

Week 29: Back To The Grind

Easter is now over and it's back to the usual routine. This blog post will cover the work I have done over the Easter along with the stuff I've done over the last week, which is mostly work I didn't manage to start during the break.

The start of my Easter break I spent texturing all the models I didn't texture before, which are smaller props and assets for populating the level. As this project has progressed I have definitely seen an improvement in my abilities to hand paint textures and I now actually really enjoy the process, where as before I dreaded doing hand-painted things.

A selection of assests

I also regret not doing a high-poly bake for some my assets, as I think an amazing normal map would have pushed certain models so much further. The reason I didn't bake is because I was worried of the amount of time it could eat up, as my previous bakes have taken up a lot of time due to lack of knowledge. If we get any summer projects I might bake everything just for practice. Below is one of the texture sheets I created over the Easter.

1024 - Various models

Aside from texturing I spent some of the break finishing off the UI elements I created, most of which was just adding animation to the various parts. I did come up with another solution to my HUD problem that I couldn't fix too, now instead of the HUD being constantly showing it just pops up in little tutorial message boxes, which do appear to be working fine.

It's animated, honest!

I am glad that the HUD problem has finally come to an end, while the final result might not be exactly what I wanted, I am happy that I resolved the situation. The aim for the tutorial messages was to get the instructions shown in a clear way, that wouldn't confuse anyone, as I don't know what age range will be potentially playing this game. The tutorial messages are also animated, I promise! I should try and capture some footage of them in action.

The rest of my holiday was spent either doing a required essay, planning for a presentation or just relaxing. I finally managed to get around to playing Bayonetta 2, which I am glad to say is a fantastic sequel and I even grabbed myself a copy of Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, which fixes a lot of the problems the original game had.

Next week I'll be finishing off the essay for the 24th of April, once and for all finishing off the UI and then will be preparing for the final weeks of the this project, as May 8th is getting closer!