Last time I was talking about all of the admin needed for the OTM submission; me and Denzil have been working hard and finally the group blogs done these can be seen at: http://thewonderinglandsofalice.blogspot.co.uk/.
I also spoke about waiting for the newest Unreal Engine 4 update; being 4.8.0. This version of the Engine came out recently and so I upgraded the level and decided to see if it would fix our flickering log problem. Unfortunately when trying to package the updated level there was a horde of errors; me and my flat mate sat down for an hour or two trying to fix these however some of them were to do with blueprints, due to newer updates. Thus I decided to stop trying to fix the errors because I wouldn't want to break anyone's blueprints. Therefore we will have to submit the level with flickering logs it's a shame but hopefully the judges will understand and can see them working in the video provided.
In between lazing around for 3 weeks and working on admin for OTM I have done things! I know shock horror, I will not have a repeat of last years summer where I did no work what so ever. This year I am aiming to do loads of projects in my spare time. I have recently been working on a horror project inspired by P.T., with James (http://jmbroderick.blogspot.co.uk/), Zhané (http://wearethinkingcritically.blogspot.co.uk/) and Hazrat (http://thegamesartlootchest.blogspot.co.uk/). Unfortunately we haven't been able to work on this as a group much because people are having to work on OTM full time, but I have been working on making a phone for the game; you use this as a flash light in the game. I decided to take this as an opportunity to learn how to high poly bake. Here's how I went about this process:
Firstly I created a low and high poly model in 3DS Max (as shown above) this was then put into x-normal where I generated an occlusion and normal map. I soon realised that my modeled didn't match up in max and fixed this so that the normal's would be in the right place. I then re-baked it and tested the timings of generating a cage to see how this would differ the bake, honestly it didn't make much difference but i ended up using a 25s bake.
As you can see the bake left artifacts so I fixed this up in Photoshop. I also didn't like the way that some of the bakes looked so I generated a height map in x-normal and made a normal map in crazy bump. I combined the parts that I liked of both of these maps and created a hybrid normal map. I know this isn't the way that high poly baking is meant to work but it came out with the best solution so I don't mind.
Here is the final normal map on the low poly model. The next thing to do was texture so I set off on making an albedo, metallic and roughness map. Here are the finished maps:
Albedo
Normal
Roughness
Metallic
Occlusion
and finally here is the finished textured phone in UE4:
Overall I'm very pleased with how this turned out, I have learnt a lot about how to bake models now and I will be using this for models from now on. I have also been messing around with a website called sketchfab and I have recently just posted my Sloth chacter on there, as shown below:
I have also spoken to a tutor and a third year about what they think we should do over summer and what people wished they had learnt over summer before starting third year here are a few things that were brought up in conversation:
Learn zbrush, xnormal and UE4 (lighting and vertex painting).
Get faster at modelling.
Do dioramas and things for your portfolio.
Write a CV and cover letter and make an online portfolio.
Make sure you have made your FMP before (meaning make sure you know how to do it, if you are doing an environment make sure you have made one before).
Look at professionals work and work towards their level.
Find ways to be unusual and interesting.
Do the professional practice breifs from the year before
and finally GO PLACES AND SEE THINGS
The last thing was something that James and myself were going to do anyway and Chris suggested to look at: Swithland woods, The out woods, Bradgate park and Beacon hill. I am looking into going to all of these places to gather reference. Hopefully you will be seeing more work soon,
As you know we have handed in our level at DMU but we still have a few things to do for the official submission. I advised my group not to work on the level anymore because it was finished, if we were too add anything else it might change the feel of the level. I also want to work on personal projects as I felt I haven't learnt a lot from this project and wouldn't be learning anything new by continuing it. There is along list of things needed for the British Library and Game City hand in first being a logo for our group; I asked Braden to design this for us and he got to work straight away, coming up with this:
Initial logo design
I loved this however I felt it would get lost on the video and documents so I asked kindly and Braden came up with another 2 designs:
2 more logo designs
I adore these and decided to choose this one for our final logo:
Final logo
We also have to send them a presentation showing a quick overview of how we made the game. I did all of this and wrote notes on each slide to tell the judges exactly what happened. Here is a screenshot of the slides; It had to be 5-10 slides long:
Presentation
It starts of with an introduction to research, concepts, level design, planning, Alice, Modelling and Texturing, Engine, User Interface and Final Level.
We also needed a group photo which is a problem considering that some people have gone home; so I have made a quick image, hopefully Denzil can find the one he took at the start of the project.
Group photo
I have also packaged the level into a game! I have even sent it to a friend to play test it and it works fine EXCEPT from my lovey destructible logs. They flicker when broken, yay! This has been looked into by the people that make Unreal Engine and have fixed this in their newest version. So I just have to wait till 4.8.0 comes out and upgrade the level; fingers crossed this doesn't break anything else in the level, if it does we will just have to submit flickering logs.
Screenshot of broken logs
We are also graded on our file structure in the competition so I have organised the files to exactly how the want them, as shown here:
File organisation
Our group blog (http://thewonderinglandsofalice.blogspot.co.uk/) is still looking very sparse and I have set Denzil the job of writing up these blogs for everyone's individual blogs. So far this is going very slowly and I will be helping him with them now as I have finished all of the other admin.
Finally we also needed a new video with specific logos and timings.
Here is the finished video; with fancy editing and a new matinee made by me:
That's everything so far, I will update you when the group blogs are done and when I have tested out the level in 4.8.0. Cheerio for now.
