Sunday 1st January 2023:
With a large list of goals on my Trello board to accomplish, it didn't take long before I was itching to work again, eager to tweak and polish my build before submission.
15th December - I started by going back and re-doing the wall material I had covering most of my wall pieces - I had not scaled the texture quite correctly and while it was passable in its current state, as most of the walls weren't very visible behind grates or pillars, I was still acutely aware of it. This was a nice easy task to begin with, and you can see a before and after picture below.
Before: stretched and ugly texture, with the light hitting the scratches badly in a distracting manner
After: much sleeker and smoother, and colour-matched to my other wall variations too
On the same day, I also fixed my mural texture - in my rush to get all my textures done before the last cinematic deadline, I had quickly done a texture for the painting that is on the roof of the throne room. Only when I added the texture into my scene, I realised it was rotated 90 degrees off, as I hadn't been paying enough attention to the rotation of the mesh during texturing. Thankfully, this was a quick texture to redo, as the texture being rotated had been annoying me immensely in the meantime.
16th Dec: Another area I wanted to improve in the build was the texturing of the cloth covering the lounge chairs in the scene. I started by re-texturing the gold of the chairs to match with the throne and walls, so that the albedo and metallic values of everything in the scene would match. I also wanted to improve the look of the cloth material covering the chair, and decided to use nCloth in Maya. I simulated a plane draped over the chair in Maya, and took it into Zbrush, where I used the Cloth brushes to add a few more creases, before using this high poly and baking it in Substance Painter. Overall, I was quite happy with the result, and felt that the cloth looked a bit more realistic in terms of creases and the way it fell over the chair, instead of just sitting on top as a coloured section of the same chair mesh.
20th Dec: The next goal on my list was to fix the windows of my scene - the decal that I had painted on the window was painted on both panes of the glass, as I had stacked the UV shells, which created a blurred effect when viewed from afar at any angle other than perfectly straight on. This was thankfully another quick fix - I used lamberts in Maya to distinguish which pane of glass I wanted the texture on, and reimported the mesh, using basic coloured parameter nodes to make sure the unpainted glass was still opaque.
I also worked on adding some cushions to the throne, as several people correctly pointed out that the throne didn't look very comfortable as it was. I actually ended up making these in Maya, using bevels and texturing them in Substance Painter. I decided it would be more polycount-friendly to use Substance Painter's fill layers with a mask to create the appearance of creases. I struggled to get the colour to match my throne initially, due to the harsh spotlight shining on the throne that I was hoping to overhaul later, but managed to get something that matched fairly well after some experimentation.
24th Dec: Next, I worked on adding to my fire VFX. I initially decided to add both smoke and a flickering light material, following a combination of the same tutorial I followed last year for the smoke (Cryer, 2021) and a Learning Space tutorial (Pryn, 2022) for the flickering material. I had to tweak the smoke tutorial quite a bit to get the velocity of the smoke to float naturally up from the flames but eventually managed to get it to look okay.
I then made the flickering light material and added that below the other two particle systems, however I decided that I didn't like the final look of that, as the flickering material changed the colour of the smoke and made it too difficult to see when the light was on. Because it was an easy material to make though, I will definitely use it in future projects.
I also took some time during this day to move some of my pillars just slightly, as they weren't perfectly symmetrical in the main hallway, and that concluded the work for this day.
Unfortunately, medical issues once again reared their head. I was already ill with a bad cold for the majority of the holiday, but I also had a flare up of my chronic illness, leaving me bedbound for a period of time. Concerned about finishing everything and with no idea as to when the flare up would end, I decided to apply for an AD, extending my deadline to the 26th. Despite not feeling my best, I entered the New Year optimistic for the end of the module, and the possibilities of what I could achieve in the new semester.
References:
CRYER, The. 2021. Ue4 Niagara Steam Smoke tutorial [youtube tutorial]. Available at: https://youtu.be/cuQyeQxO0Kk [accessed 24th December 2022]
PRYN, William. 2022. GART230_LightFunctions_in_UE5 [online Learning Space lecture] Available at: https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/29f096d9-a943-4705-af17-f8e7382c9198 [accessed 24th December 2022]
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