Week 16 - 17 - Finishing Up
These last 2 weeks have been a classic montage of touching up textures, fixing broken blueprints and just overall tweaking based on feedback. From the last update, I finished my texturing for both levels and have touched up the base colour and PBR related texture inputs on assets that I thought needed a little extra attention to help better integrate them into the scene.
The image below is taken of the final asset to be textured which is the Ships wheel that will be suspended on the wall with the wooden peg. This was a fairly simple asset to texture because I had spent so much time overindulging in Zbrush meaning that the detail could be mostly achieved through using the curvature and a few generators. That being said, for some extra love and attention, I gave the full wheel a hand paint pass just to make the materials look a little more purposeful in how I put marks down on the model.
I also spent some time fixing my shadow man animation. I felt that the original blueprint was timed a little too chaotically and the eye had no time to anti anticipate any of the movement that was happening. The way that I overcame this was to have the particle effect shoot off first and have it travel out of view to give the viewer time to look over at the shadow man. I then added 10 or so more frames to the original animation in order to have the shadow man on screen a little longer to allow him to react to his impending missile. I feel that resulting sequence is far better now because the audience is able to appreciate individual events more than everything happening at once.
Along with some colour adjustment, the large amount of work in this time went towards getting the levels to feel right with the game-play mechanics and one problem that I had was that I wanted to have it so you could return from the interior scene back to the place in the exterior where you entered instead of having you jump back to the start of the game location. I had initially thought that this would be an easy fix, however it turned out to be a much more technical process that I had anticipated.
The first step was to get both levels loading correctly to reduce wait times between the two scenes through utilising level streaming which in future, will be something that I set up at the start of the process instead of near the end which was a mistake on my part. Now the way the levels set up, you are able to start loading the interior scene when you travel half way up the staircase and then it unloads the scene when you press E to enter the boat. The same thing would then apply in reverse. The tricky part was getting the character to return to a previous position in a different map without this detail being lost in the process. This is the part where I give a shout out to Dan Upton, our friendly neighbourhood engine wizard to give me a hand because it turned into quite the epic task. Again, in future, these kind of problems would be easier to solve when I work on the level through utilising level streaming from the get go instead of the end.
The rest of my time has been spent getting the work ready for hand in and to publish online. This process is always underestimated by people as it can take a very long time to get the right shots and breakdowns for a pleasing presentation. You have to remember that all people will be seeing of your work will be the couple of shots that you deem good enough to show online that best represents the hard work you've put in to creating it. So its worth spending the extra time doing this. I decided that I wanted a level fly through ontop of the resulting images so I also accommodated extra time for editing the footage and editing camera rails and playback rates etc... so that I could get the best quality result to show off my levels.
After some lighting tweaks and moving verts one hundreth of a millimeter to the left, I just needed to hand in and get working on my online presence. Cant wait to finally show people the final result of this project as I'm finally seeing it as a finished product which is exciting times!