Off The Map: Easter surprise

It's was the final week before the Easter break and the pressure started to set in; We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. So towards the end of the week I made a timetable depicting exactly everything everyone needed to get finished over Easter. Luckily for us after me making this we got given an extension for the DMU hand in by an extra 2 weeks; this was a big relief but at the same time we need to make sure we get a substantial amount done over Easter and not take advantage of the extension. I have now fully updated the project timeline; this shows a day by day timetable of what every individual person should be working on. 

This week Freddy and I have been mainly working on getting the level looking better, Freddy made rock textures and masks using a new technique that Braden showed us. 

3 opacity masks on one texture.

This is done by using the R,G and B channels in Photoshop and sectioning up 3 different maps into one. This is something I am going to be using on all of my project from now on. It can also be used for roughness, metallic and emissive maps. It's a great way of optimising a level and after the DMU hand in I am definitely going to go over some of our textures.

With these masks I created 3 main materials and then using parameters made material instances of these; doing this means that the engine only has to load the parent material and the children will load too. 

All of our rock materials, the majority being instances.

How the parameters are set up in the parent material.

Masked planes in Engine.

This week I have also finally gotten round to modelling the environment; by this I mean the side pieces of the rabbit hole drop. It looks very simple to model but It was very hard to get that paper crafted look with out it looking blocky and boring; hopefully you will think I have pulled it off; here's what the level is looking like so far:

In the video you might spot that the houses are now textured, this is what Braden has been working on. It took a while to get the same feel of the rest of the level but I feel that he has matched it perfectly so it was definitely worth the extra time.

Luke has continued working on his particle effects and hopefully I will be able to get them into the level soon. Here's a link to a video he posted of his work so far; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vScJU7jUYY&feature=youtu.be

Denzil has continued working on the cat model unfortunetly I don't have any screenshots to show but he's looking cute and is now getting his fur after being moved into the right position. We totally didn't use cats laying on radiators for reference. 

Dan gathered a lot of feedback from tutors and staff at Natural motion and has been working on getting his Alice perfect.

She looks cuter now with a better shape to her dress and chest, her arms are now longer and thicker and her face is now more plump and child like. She is going to look amazing in our level!

Now it's just time to get everything finished!

Cherrio for now, I will hopefully have some more to show on our off the map stuff soon.

References:

Cat on a radiator picture: http://funny-pictures.picphotos.net/radiator-cat/roflzoo.com*pics*052010*radiator-cat-big.jpg/
Let's get this over with cat .gif: http://wifflegif.com/tags/4407-grumpy-cat-gifs