Week 13 - Paint by numbers!

Shot_1

Shot_2

Shot_3

Light_Beam_1

Light_Beam_2

Shadow_Man

Texture! Texture! Texture!

I upped my texturing game this week in-case that wasn't clear. As I mentioned in last weeks update, I was looking into finding ways to speed up my texturing work-flow to accommodate for the fact that I had a lot of pieces to uniquely texture in a short space of time. The main addition to my work-flow involves creating quick painterly tiling textures as I go so that I am able to use them to help me complete other assets at a quicker rate. A perfect example of this was in the barrel seen in the shot below.

The way that I went about texturing this asset was to use the materials I used to texture the bath tub and the wooden boards to texture the boat walls to form a solid foundation that I could work from. I could then dedicate more of my time to hand paint over the top of these textures to make them more suitable for the context of the asset and to set the colours apart from the other similar materials in the scene so it doesn't blend in too much but also remains believable to the world that its in. To strengthen the assets volume, I often tend to add some more exaggerated implied lighting and AO to the assets just as a means of creating more of a nice value change.

I basically employed this technique to everything else in the scene. to texture except the food which were so small and low resolution, I just hand painted them straight off of the bat because the scale doesn't require large attention of details other than those to sell what it is the food is. You'll notice I've left the divers helmet, spyglass and lanterns un-textured at the moment and that is because they each use exactly the same material as each other. This is great because it means that I only have to make one tiling texture and I am able to use on each asset and just edit them accordingly to suit my reference for each asset more. This should hopefully speed up the production of the assets a lot more whilst maintaining a consistent level of quality.

I've had some great feedback on this scene as it stands and some of the points for improvement involved, adding more geometry to areas like the ropes in order to better maintain a consitent level of detail not justin the textures but also in the tri-counts for each asset. Others include implying more gravity to some of the hanging elements such as the buoys or bananas where the position of them could do with some tweak them to imply more weight which I will improve next week also.

In other news, I had this idea this week to place something in the central focal point of the scene that would add a little more interest to this area than just the fancy chair. The idea was to place Mama Odie's Voodoo staff propped on the chair cushion. Then the shadow man that is currently place holder, appears in the scene to attempt to retrieve this artefact. Following the attack, the staff shoots out this magic effect that you can see illuminating the scene along a spline set up within UE4 and I can control this to aim for the shadow man with the intent to destroy him. The way I'm going to achieve this effect is to create a flip book animation texture for the shadow man and set up a sequence in blueprints to control the timing and speed in order to make one fluid motion of events that tie together.

This idea stemmed from my desire to get more movement in the scene. The boat is currently rocking now through tilting the playable camera on its axis which was a nice challenge. The tricky part was getting the hanging bottles to remain hanging downwards as the camera rotated. The way I overcome this problem with help from some extra UE4 expertise from my colleagues, was to invert the camera rotation speed and degree so that they appear to be still when in fact they are rotating in the other direction to the boat. I believe that this along with the other moving elements in the scene should give an adequate amount of visual interest for the viewer after travelling through the exterior scene.

This current effect still needs a lot of love to get working but we'll see what its looking like next week as its currently showing a lot of promise to get working so we'll see how that goes. This weeks been a bit of less involved update purely because, its mostly been me working on textures for the scene. That being said I am a lot happier with how the scene is progressing and how adding some more colour and movement to the is really starting the bring the environment to life. Next week I aim to get the scenes all set up and playable with level transitions available to the player controller so that I can start refining everything in the background. It is very comforting that the is soon to be coming to the levels of polishing which is happening a week sooner than I had originally anticipated which is great. This should allow me more time to create some fancy effects for UE4 so I'll just keep at it and check in next week.