3D Games Production (week twentyfive)

This week, I underwent UE4 presentation.

I had an idea for lighting scenario in place - I wanted to choose ambient lighting as my preferred lighting choice. This is mainly because I envisioned having light coming from the fire pit itself.

So for the ambient lighting, I made sure I have lighting that was representative of bounce light for the scene. Including oranges, Slightly lower opacity blues and purples.

Overall the scene has a strong composition and lighting scenario and the fire and candle flames only add to this.

If I were to change something for future reference, I would maybe add a few extra props for my scene in order to establish an environment scenario, which represents the practicality of the fireplace.

Blog Task 5 - Observing objects from life

 

These stone slabs have been worn in certain places.

The corner could have probably been shipped when it was replaced, something crashed into it at a certain angle, or just general weathering.

Additionally, it has some brown stain marks which could have came from cleaning the slabs.

There is presence of moss which could have came about due to various weather conditions.

This metal chimney has a few indents which were probably caused when the metal was hammered and/or pressed.

Furthermore, there is some white specs which could be caused by debris coming out of the chimney

The paint on this brick wall is cracked, which could be due to weather conditions loosening the dried paint over a long period of time.

Due to harsh dry and wet weather conditions the paint could crack and flake off the wall.

Furthermore, there could be a possibility that a door was swung open onto this spot causing this specific kind of indentation

3D Games Production (week twentyfour)

This week, I wanted to do some map analysis of my work. Last week I went over fixing some of the maps to be more representative and ensuring some baking problems were fixed.

I went over my maps, ensuring everything was channel packed ready to be imported into UE4.

Overall, the albedo is very strong and the colours are representative of what I want to portray, the only problem I seemed to encounter was trying to saturate colours or offset colours to make everything less streamlined and less of the same colour all the way around. It was difficult to do offset colours when a lot of the materials were the same colour, such as rock and wood have a variation of brown or warm-grey, which makes it difficult to pick out colours - as wood would not be as saturated as an orange or hot light for example.

Finding the colour balance was difficult, but I believe this could be fixed with lighting in UE4, as it is a PBR piece which reacts based on a lighting scenario. Maybe adding lights into the scene with an offset hue may improve the textures.

Roughness, Metallic, AO map

Albedo/Colour map

Normal map

3D Games Production (week twentythree)

 This week I wanted to go back and correct some baking issues I had.

After discussing with Scott how to go about changing the maps I made, I opened Photoshop and started to correct some of the problems I encountered.

Many issues I had included the bake making lines through the bake because of the attenuation radius - this caused lines from things in front
of the bake to bake down inconsistently.

So to combat this, I went into photoshop to paint out the inconsistencies.

I did this for most of the maps, but mainly the normals and the ambient occlusion maps.

Edited AO map

Non-edited AO map with pointed out baking issues

3D Games Production (week twentytwo)

This week, I wanted to start working on baking and re-building my mesh.

One problem I encountered with step build to re-topologise my mesh was when linking certain vertices together, it connected to the wrong one, sometimes connecting to verts I didn't even select. However, I finished this and managed to contain my remesh under the tri budget, hitting around 7000 tris.

After this, I took it into substance to start baking, this process went rather smoothly, however, there were some issues when baking down details, for example, near the bottom of the stone on the fireplace, there was a clear black line going through the bake, but I manually corrected the normals and ambient occlusion map within photoshop which seemed to solve this issue.

After much more deliberation, I was thinking after the fact about what other assets I could have included. Scott recommended for extra assets, I could have maybe put a book in the piece, I had however finished unwrapping by this point, but I will keep this in mind for future projects.

AO Map

Normal map

Retop mesh

3D Games Production (week twentyone)

This week I tasked myself with creating the high poly for my fireplace.

The initial idea was to layer up bricks for the main fireplace. But after attempting this, the bricks didn't line up correctly, so I just decided to go with a stone structure. Stylistically, it looks good. Furthermore, I took on advice from Scott where I divided some of my materials up, like I did for my house project - So I placed metal braces on the wooden beams to break the flow. Furthermore, I made sure to create the logs with detail rather than leaving them as flat objects, this way it gave the fireplace more depth.

I didn't find much difficulty in making my sculpt, the only problem I had was I had the occasional programme freeze, but I eventually got the sculpt done.

3D Games Production (week twenty)

This week I wanted to start drafting up ideas for my fireplace.

In my original concept, I wanted to include a tree trunk, I believed this would give it a good aesthetic, but after looking at my reference (mainly from world of warcraft and other stylised sources, this would not have worked out.

Furthermore, given I had not taken into account the different materials/maps I would be using, I ended up discarding this idea.

However, my second idea that I made in max was a much more fleshed out design, thinking of materials this time, especially metal, for the grills, stone for the diorama base and main fireplace body, wood for the planks and braces, then finally wax for the candles.

This gives me a good range of materials to work with and I would like to take this model further.

Original concept

Adapted design