Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project - Adding UI and More Blueprints (Week 16) (24/04/2023)
Feedback) Desaturation and Relight
Working off of the great “de-reddening” of the previous week to break down noise I ended up also using more post process effects to knock down noise. I ended up looking from afar and trying to break up my tunnel vision that has built up over the past 5 months to see what imperfections lie value wise. And realised that the entire scene was very saturated still. Particularly on red, almost a varnish of red coat to a fresh new diner was the aesthetic occurring. So I used a LUT and some highlight selection to knock down only the red values and the effect was instant. The diner looks steadily worn in but well used and taken care of. Without any blaring reds. I also followed a lighting tutorial to breathe a bit of light into my scene and it changed everything. Kudos to Ryan Manning on his spectacular interior lighting series available on Youtube (Manning, 2019).
Making and Animating) Payphone and Final Assets
The final scrub of assets came in the form of feedback from some peers. Noting that whilst a lot of the diner was finally fitting together there were elements missing to make more contextual sense of areas such as the sink. Or the copious amount of packaging but no cardboard origin. Additionally I want to try to tackle sound design following my successful jukebox blueprinting the previous week and so need a prominent nose. What better place to make a public phone than a public busting diner?
I fell instantly in love with the retrofit of the Western Electric Two Piece Payphone (1964 variant). Its design dated the diner's age to a minimum of 10 years of operation. Additionally its semi complex dials made for a great challenge to finish off my assets for the diner on and would really draw attention to the entrance nearby the jukebox. I ended up gliding through modelling, texturing and animating with ease thanks to the copious reference available for all these models.
Feedback) Adding More Geometry
A bad habit I tend to go back to is over optimising my meshes. Almost to a comedic low poly level. This has unfortunately caused an effect on most circular objects to appear hexagonal if not very rigid so I have opted to, with some peer guidance, add extra loops to geometry such as the sofas, walls and even jukebox pipes. This simple fix added a lot more believability and rigidity to the mesh since the amount of repetition from these assets at such a low poly knocked down the remaining meshes around it.
Bugfix) Lightmap Issues with Floor
The ghost of lightmap visited me when making the floors and has since haunted me when I started this project. I have time and time again tried to resolve the issues of strange dark shadows being baked into corners, flipped normals and more breaking in the UVS of my floor. I ended up getting so frustrated I remade the entire floor as optimally and straight unwrapped as possible however I did not realise the real solution was a much quicker fix. In reality due to the copious large export of the lightmap the entire scene had assigned very comically small lightmaps to much of my assets. Many of which were in the highly under texel density bracket and needed to be brought up. Once I did this for the floor the issue finally went away.
Blueprints) Moving Doors, Cupboards And Toilet
One thing all my blueprints for moving doors, cupboards and even the toilet stalls have in common is the lerped motion of angle a to b. After some tutorials and testing I found the most effective way to animate between two points that could be changed at any time was to timeline a lerp as an alpha channel and have it go through values 1 to 2 of which are parameters.
Broken Doors:
An unfortunate issue I had with other blueprints was that rotating the angle of the mesh over the 90 degrees to have it facing another direction would inherently break this rotation. So by setting the points manually you can easily animate just the perfect amount (and even expand this by making “locked” doors). These locked elements will jiggle and portray the message of it being locked adding just a little bit of flair to the first person experience.
Fixed Doors:
Blueprint) Clock Animation, Crouch, Pickup Items And Zoom
The most difficult in rank of blueprints I added next in comparison to my behemoth of a Wurlitzer blueprint had to be the physics pickup controls. For zoom and crouching all that had to be blueprinted was the boolean switching of cameras adjusting in and out or the camera moving down when on crouch and releasing when not. For physics objects the first person shoots a ray that scans if you can even pick up the object and once it successfully does so it adds it to the object. When you drop it it restarts the process. Quite easy in theory however adding the motion of scrolling the objects like a real Gmod game and the fact this script runs on every frame causing some issues if you drop and grab the object too quickly… The blueprint was a bit of a nightmare to set up. However, careful delays and checks function well. The clock on the other hand was simply a timeline similar to the door however I wanted to add a bit of randomness in the starting position due to having clocks out of sync around the diner. I believe manually without some radio signalling clocks would naturally fall slightly out of sync seconds wise so this little random assignment adds a bit of variety amongst the clocks on runtime.
Blueprint) Adding UI Image and Text
Some of the easiest but most game breaking blueprints I had to set up have to be the text on screen blueprints. These only consist of colliders and an image/text that is projected when in the zone. However the unreal engine collision box is more inconsistent than my printer when low on toner ink. When bridging the edge of the box or being just a tad bit on the fence of entering/leaving it always leaves. Meaning that the text prematurely disappears. This issue also affects all other blueprints with collision boxes aka all of them. Super annoying and I ended up having to give a delay of a few seconds before the text removes itself to make it readable when it decides to prematurely vanish. I have linked below in my bibliography all of the helpful tutorials that have helped shape my blueprints to this point.
Bibliography)
Aspland, M. (2021) Picking up and moving objects | inspect item part 1 - unreal engine 4 tutorial. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR7PVYo2ZGo (Accessed: 24 April 2023).
Aspland, M. (2020) Press E to interact | on screen prompt - unreal engine 4 tutorial, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os7uf-wiU8o (Accessed: 24 April 2023).
3D Ross, 3D Ross (2020) UE4 smooth camera zoom in & out, YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/vVqkU-_vj_E (Accessed: 24 April 2023).
Manning, R. (2019) Ue4 - interior lighting (basics). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUEEIOyyKVo (Accessed: 24 April 2023).