Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Formative Feedback and Posters (Week 9) (06/03/2023)

Formative Feedback)

Following my presentation I got quite a bit of feedback regarding many aspects of textures, model quality and reusability. The first issue being the high gloss and roughness of my floor as all of it looked fairly clean but was highly glossy as though recently mopped but without residue. To remedy this I will turn down the roughness and add more realistic dirt and use it for a diner of around 20~ years of age. The secondary point was that as many of my models had yet to be made they had quite low geometry and appeared quite inconsistent in values. It was quite difficult to focus on the hero asset of the Wurlitzer 1015 due to how tonally bright and overshot much of the scene was. With some advice I will use post processing and redo my lighting to make my scene less intense in the coming week. My final point of feedback was in regard to the lack of decals to truly make assets stand out and have more narrative to them to make for a messy diner. I will consider this in production and will be sure to make plenty of decals of wear and tear as to not make elements of seating, counters and more mirror copies of one another. However with a lack of assets I will prioritise production and have decals be within my final weeks of polish should my schedule workout.

Research) Posters

To keep the diner walls busy like a classic cluttered American diner of the period I went to research posters/ads of the time to tie it more into the period. When scouting my local library I found a book perfect for the purpose. I took out a book by Steven Heller all about ads/posters of the 70s (Heimann, 2004). Each page was a goldmine and I ended up taking photos of just about half the book, particularly focusing on the food, rock and roll posters and anything coca cola related since much of the advertisement looked fittingly retro dated. 

Modelling and Texturing) Posters

I then took these shots into Photoshop to raise the values and clean up the edges. I ended up having about 80 shots I quite liked so I had to cut down quite a bit in the final cut, making for 2 pages of posters. I also made my own posters in reference to pop art of the period of pricing of some menu items I wanted to focus upon like milkshakes and hot dogs.  I tried to keep pricing consistent and kept checking back to my menu board I made and the physical menu as well. After I made the base colour with a bit of padding bleeding colours I brought it into Painter to add the additional polish of roughness and normals. I was advised here to add little pins and details to the edges of many posters of which would be hanging on their own as to give them a more realistic sense of design. 

I did however want to frame and distinguish more fancy posters in regard to rock and roll and added a tiling frame on the bottom of each page to use it in a hybrid trim fashion. I combined these maps in Designer as well with an alpha to make the final sheet. I then took this sheet into 3DSMax, cut out the UVS, duplicated and moved them slightly to bring all the posters to separate instances. I could have instead opted to design a fancy material with scaling in the engine but figured geometry was way cheaper than 50 material instances with a lot of UV tiling so this worked out better. 

Making) Signs, Pots and Narrative

Bibliography)

Heimann, J. (2004) 70s: All-American ads. 1st edn. Köln, America : Taschen. 

Boyarsky, B. (1972) ‘LANDSLIDE VICTORY FOR [Richard M.] NIXON’, Los Angeles Times Newspaper (Wednesday Morning, November 8, 1972) Front Cover Headline: ‘LANDSLIDE VICTORY FOR [Richard M.] NIXON’. 1972nd edn, 8 November, p. 1. 

Boyarsky, B. (1972b) Los Angeles Times newspaper (Wednesday ..., Los Angeles Times: Good Soft cover (1972) 1st Edition | Bloomsbury Books. Available at: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/first-edition/Angeles-Times-Newspaper-Wednesday-Morning-November/16885734074/bd (Accessed: 06 March 2023). 

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Making the Wurlitzer 1015 (Week 8) (27/02/2023)

Research) The Iceberg of the Design and Structure of the Wurlitzer 1015 Jukebox

Welcome to the deep dive on America's greatest jukebox from the 1950s. And yes whilst this diner is set in the 1970s this prominent hit of a machine was still very much in use then and even today. Many units are still going and can fetch for as high as $11,000. Or more. But for such feats of engineering without micro computers and a whole analogue scene to get them playing just about any old record (or even CDs) I cannot be more impressed. Anyways the core components j wanted to figure out was the record mechanism and the tubes. I ended up breaking down the bubble tubes and colour changing a bit further down but the record mechanism is in itself worthy a mention. Thank you to Uncle Doug (Doug, 2013) for providing such great video resources to showcase this in action. In itself it's fairly simple, as the record selected revolves out and then is pushed up. The machine need not know how lower down the record is or how long it has to play. It pushes it up till it meets the record head regardless and plays till it reaches the centre punched into all records. Following a successful play it redoes this in reverse. Using gravity to bring down the record and revolve back without a hitch. And with this in mind I will model the components separately for animating in similar fashion. 

Modelling) Both High and Low Poly

Fortunately making this detailed jukebox was relatively easy to start as I did greybox a similar geometrical jukebox many weeks prior. Unfortunately for me was that the model I used as reference for the greybox was an influenced modern jukebox of the Wurlitzer 1015. Not the actual one. So I had to manually model the clubder tubes in, use a lot of splines for the fanciful metal work across its middle pieces and dot out every single button by hand. It took many hours but as a hero asset I knew the detail would be worth it. Some might ask with a high poly as crazy as this one why not opt for Zbrush? As it has high capabilities for making these metal slides. This ultimately lies on my own time constraints. For working with Zbrush would need Z-Remeshing and would not provide such a clean mesh as 3DsMax could during modelling. And such I made both the low poly insides, outsides and high poly all in 3DsMax. 

UE4 Shader Work) The Bubbler Tubes and Changing Colour Tubes

As mentioned before I wanted to include the illusive and recognisable colour whirling (get it?) mechanism. What was thought to be some chemical mixed LEDs or coloured bulbs is actually much simpler in operation. The analogue machine moves a tube round and light is brought through sheets of transparent coloured plastic. This colour is what is seen on the tubes and by syncing this rotation you can change the entire lower half in succession to a variety of 4 main colours. Pretty impressive for a machine over 60 years ago isn't it?  Anyways to replicate this I made sure to keep a separate material for this and furthermore set up a custom shader. The shader would pan through the colours and as the UV channels aligned in the order from centre to out it would be able to similarly cycle out this colour. And similarly pan out the bubbles vertically moving them like actual rising bubble tubes.

Issues and Broken Gifs)

However this was not without issue. My UV channels were quite spread out as I wanted to bake them with their detail in a more spaced fashion. This was a bad choice in hindsight as it gave the sides a delay since the tubes were not perfectionally aligned. So I had to amend this and bam boom my Wurlitzer 1015 is another step closer to behaving like the real deal!

Shots of Wurlitzer)

After many hours working on it here are some kickass renders. It's still not rigged unfortunately as that intiself will take time and blueprinting so I am leaving that to a very hopefully stretch goal. However I'm quite pleased with the detail I was able to get away with and the shader at work. Now to polish up the rest of my assets in a similar light! 

Bibliography:

(2013) Wurlitzer Bubble Tubes: How They're Made and What Makes Them Bubble . YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hIyw-YgSm8 (Accessed: (27/02/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Decal and Diner Menu Design (Week 7) (20/02/2023)

Material Instances and Setting up Neon Splines)

With my gathered reference I realise with the design and name of the Pink Lady Diner I might as well add pink to the diner. As this design is based much upon Grease and their infamous Pink Ladies gang it would pay good tribute to have actual pink and blue dotted about. Fortunately there was a lot of reference for diners that had already adopted this light pastel colour scheme and all i had to do was set up some clever material instances. With my master material adding control for hue shifts, brightness and even saturation with nodes plugged before the final output of the base colour I could easily manipulate the results to fit exactly to what I needed. Additionally the benefit with colouring the base mesh as red means all hue shifts are of the same value to get the same shades of pink and blue across all my meshes. And so I went assigning every furniture a splash in a recurring pattern of pink or blue. I then moved into the neon as I really wanted to instance some bending neon strips around my scene. However to prevent myself having to manually build this neon line I went for the easier route of creating a blueprint with a spline component. This spline would then build upon its end another neon strip until I met the end of where I wanted to place it. I then ran this strip along the entire upper ceiling much like my references to line the reflective metal walls there with an emissive neon. That I could once again control the brightness of material instances.

Diner Menu Designing and Iterations)

Designing the diner menu was one of the most fun parts so far as it dictated much of everything in the kitchen and front of house. I first began by gathering a lot of reference for simple but effective menu designs particularly taking much inspiration from r/VintageMenus (Reddit, 2023) subreddit of old menus. This also led me to figure out appropriate pricing of food items and how I would bundle them appropriately to make meal deals at breakfast or lunch. I ended up opting for the classic set of eggs and sausage combos, pancakes and hashbrowns and even cereal for an easy breakfast. I figured that for the most family friendly experience as well I might as well cater to all possible taste buds and went the classic diner route of hamburgers, fries and shakes for lunch/dinner. With pricing and items locked down I went to spicing them up with unique names and references to all 1970s pop culture. In total I have around 30+ references. Can you spot them all?

Decals of Best Selling Diner Items) For Whiteboard

With a great menu comes a great board of deals. To seal the deal on many popular items and most likely the best to go food combos I wrote them up onto decals which would further be plastered onto my boards. I kept to 3 key whiteboard pen colours of black blue and red and wrote the deals out by hand to give it that handwritten style. I also drew quick sketches of burgers, coffee and other items. leaving room for one board that would ultimately tell of why the toilets were shut down, Jolene. An infamous leader of the local teen Californian highschool known for causing trouble. With a prank going wrong in the ladies room it's currently shut and undergoing repairs. 

Bibliography:

Reddit, R. (2023) R/vintagemenus, Vintage Menus: Do you want celery with that? reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageMenus/ (Accessed: (20/02/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Texturing Front of House Assets Lot 1 (Week 7) (20/02/2023)

Modelling Front of House Final Asset Lot 1)

Welcome to the model zone, the week where I finally begin to solidify the textures and overall finalised meshes of much of my front of house. For the first lot of many I wanted to focus on the largest and most modular assets, the furniture. Specifically the chairs, barstools, sofas, tables and counters. Not to mention doors too since they play a major part in accessing many of the later rooms. To begin I gathered all my greyboxed meshes and used them as a base to work on top of. In the case of the sofa however I opted to not use it as a base but much more of a reference point with scale, dimensions and how it would assemble to make a larger modular sofa piece. With a lot of bevelling extruding and swift looping I was able to create low poly meshes that had a much more optimised topology and better UV layout to unwrap from. Then to make the higher poly I added a lot more loops before dropping a turbo smooth to give the edges that glossy smooth high poly result that would be baked down onto my low poly.

Texturing Front of House Assets Lot 1)

With my high and low poly assets assembled and UV unwrapped onto two different sheets I went onwards to texturing. For the most part I kept these sheets separate as one used an alpha channel and had emissive’s in the lamp whilst the other did not. Other factors like a metalness channel help me decide how to group assets of similar values together to keep the best texel density and general total number of maps down by having them share the same sheet. 

Anyways in texturing I began by masking every individual UV object to a folder titled with their name as to keep my work clean and neat. I then added a base colour and roughness value with the fill layer that I would further build upon with the mask editor and noise maps. I could then use the paint options on the mask to further control the spread of many procedural effects when it comes to corners, edge wear and extra smaller details of stitching or screws. 

With this done all that was left was to ensure my maps were correctly scaled in size and export them in a channel packed fashion back over to 3DsMax. In which I would reset my axis and align everything back to 0,0 for a clean export to the engine.

UE4) Glass Shader and Lamp Shader

When talking about one of my greatest battles so far in the project I cannot object to great length having to discuss the hellscape that is a glass shader. I went through many different variants to try and build something that had the effect I needed but met many tribulations so sit down and have a listen. The main overall points of which I wanted to achieve was correct refraction much like glass does to light when it passes through, have it be transparent but in a planar manner so my directional light can still pass through and the final point of it having dusted edges. I first followed some tutorials such as How to Make Glass by Jovan Tomasevic (Tomasevic, 2022). Which did good to resolve the first 2 points of making glass in a quick manner but unfortunately did not give me that edge effect. And so I went back to testing a feature I had long since forgotten about, distance fields. Distance fields are a short field that appears around the edges of a mesh and lets shadows in real-time render that bit better in most cases and also lets shaders be able to interact with one another in materials. I figured if I got the nodes setup that upon an intersection they would share it would be easy as pie. Boy was I wrong. 

My setup for the glass mesh was to use planes with a slide extrude as for thickness. This meant that it wasn't a full mesh and so distance fields refused to generate. Once I swapped to a more box approach the fields generated but had many issues intersecting with the blinds and overall making my directional lights no longer able to pass into the space. And so I had to ditch this approach and opt for regular glass that would just refract and have that rough shine real glass has. Moving into more glass like shaders previously I discussed my feedback that pinpointed the issues surrounding my lamps. They did not feel like ceramic in terms of the light that was glowing through them and upon being turned off actually acted more like grimy plaque. So with some help from my peers I realised that if I enabled a bit of subsurface scattering with a mask from my curvature map I could control the emissive glow in the way it would naturally begin to pan out from points of thickness. Much like the thick ceramic glass the lamps are most likely made out of. 

Bibliography:

(2022) How to create a GLASS Material in Unreal Engine . YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQehkg9VHJo (Accessed: (20/02/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Another Lighting Pass and Feedback (Week 6) (13/02/2023)

Another Lighting Pass and Lighting Issues)

Despite having assets in as greybox variants I was still very much struggling to compose an interesting interior lighting scenario. As the previous pass was relatively dark I was advised to make visibility easier I should make it daytime. And as I swapped the lighting the environment felt overshot. Thankfully my classmate Jacob Fellows (Fellows, 2023) who is a god at lighting was able to fix many of these overblown shots. Additionally this cut down my complexity severely as my main problem led into how little scattering was occuring. And with static lighting applied after a bake the cost was near non-existence performance wise. 

Exploring Other Rooms and Breakdown)

With my current progress sailing you may have seen that I have yet to post shots of the kitchen and toilets. This is due to the fact that they are of lower priority to develop at the moment with my planned calendar and so are more lacking in exploring assets, lighting and more material wise elements. However I did still try to get a cosy diner vibe going in these environments and led me to a problem I soon encountered. The toilets were symmetrical and essentially one and the same. This modularity wasn't a bespoke problem before as much of the environment around the assets was different but I realised that the toilets are copies and as such would need a lot of development to stand out from one another. Not mentioning both a men's and women's distinct bathroom adds the room total to 4 (foh, kitchen, men's and women's separate bathrooms). So with suggestion from feedback will close one of these with a cleaning reason as for it's sudden shutdown. Maybe a rowdy event led to the dire need of a fix or overhaul at the toilet. Or maybe worse secrets lay between the toilet stalls. 

Shots)

With my lighting amended better I am growing to quite like the cost evening atmosphere that exists currently in these renders. It feels fun to explore and has a level of familiarity in the effects of sitting down with a cup full of coffee in one of the leather seats. Of course quite low poly and jagged as they might be at the moment. 

Feedback and Problems)

One of the problem-worthy weeks as a lot of my materials are finally in the engine and unwrapped too. I ended up having to go back and forth amending UVS for the majority of my problems however there did arise a lovely list of fixes to work on the following week. The first post process was quite overshot and almost overpowering in terms of values; it was overriding for highlights and midlights. I also learnt that I should use this to colour shadows since nothing in life is naturally pure black, unless it's that vantablack paint. Additionally the foliage I have previously made seems to disappear whenever I move or delete assets around but builds back on play. Generally an odd happenstance but most likely has tie-ins with performance. I need to further test this.

Bibliography:

Fellows, J. (2023) Artstation - Jacob Fellows. Artstation . Available at: https://www.artstation.com/jake_fellows18 (Accessed: (13/02/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Exterior Work with Decals, Foliage and HDRIs (Week 6) (13/02/2023)

Making Pavement and Parking Decals and HDRis)

With my interior being planned in the previous week I sought it best to finally polish up my exterior in regards to getting that illusive depth feel of being in a diner in the East of California. The wondrous state has much of the cacti and desert scape stretching for miles and I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a solution to avoiding using the world machine. As I have previously mentioned I love world machine honestly it's my bud, but is is mentally taxing on Unreal Engine to load it. Even if I generate a smaller map or make it lower resolution the performance cost is there. But worry not, HDRIs to the rescue. HDRis are great long panoramic images that are taken and stitched together on a very long high res texture. A sphere is then instances and unwraps this around the scene. 

Fortunately a website exists where other digital artists have uploaded their HDRis from all around the world for usage. I want to formally thank the people of Poly Count for their resources (Poly Haven, 2023). Moving on I used the free plugin to enable HDRis and dropped them in. It worked like a charm and I was very ecstatic about the result. However to further sell the effect I made a very simple pavement material which was splined out to make a path further into the HDRI. Kind of blending the scape and the road into one. 

Making ADS and Billboards for Exterior)

However with on stretching windows to the outside why not capitalise on the view and drop some billboard's about. This was already in the works due to my original motel concept but I kept the flame alive and sorted to repurpose it here. After all, what doesn't date a time period better than cars and political ads? Did you know Nixon absolutely curb stomped the 1979 election? Well now you know. I created a simple trim that had all these, the diner logo and a little sign that might be too far to read giving directions to other places in California. 

Asset Import and Placement)

As previously mentioned I greyboxed around 60 high poly assets if not more (the count honestly scares me so I dare not to keep track of all) and needed to drop them into the scene. Here are the shots of that in action and the painstaking placement of all assets I had to go through. Not to mention assigning temporary materials to figure out metalness, roughness or glass and how it'll look. 

Overall it was definitely a useful venture since I needed a reference for how things would look in the scene. But it did come at the cost of my own sanity. You would think that Unreal Engine would have a mass apply material tool by now? Well no, but that doesn't mean there isn't a solution. Formal thank you to Michal Orzelek (Orzelek, 2022). His free script lets you select and assign materials to any flurry of assets as long as you highlight the material first before the assets. It struggles of course with multi material objects but it's good for basic ones with only 1. So be sure to grab it! 

Applying Materials to Walls, Floors and Ceilings)

Fortunately the process was much easier to import into the engine but way harder to unwrap for my materials. Due to lighting issues I opted to combine all my modular wall assets into a larger overarching wall and then export from Unreal Engine back into 3DSMax. I then simplified the walls into lower poly variants and longer strips before the unwrap. 

A lot of the unwrap went relatively easily as the trim sheet was simple to align now the entire mesh was one however to help provide more of a depth effect for the walls I ended up bevelling out the checker middle section. I followed a similar pipeline for my floors and ceiling just without the bevelling as the ceiling itself was levelled into different layers of elevation. This was to break up the tiling and help expand the material into something else less noisy or metallic and make my design march closer to my structure  references of diners. 

Bibliography:

Poly Haven, poly haven (2023) HDRIs • poly haven, Poly Haven. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/hdris (Accessed: (13/02/2023)

Orzelek, M. (2022) BlutilityTools: Unreal engine 4, Gumroad BlutilityTools: Unreal engine 4. Gumroad . Available at: https://m-orzelek.gumroad.com/l/BlutilityTools_UE4 (Accessed: (13/02/2023)

Dimitrios Savva, J.G. (2022) Fouriesburg Mountain Midday HDRI • poly haven, Poly Haven. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/a/fouriesburg_mountain_midday (Accessed: (13/02/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Calendar Restructure and High Poly Modelling (Week 5) (06/02/2023)

Modelling High Poly Lot)

For a lot of my modelling I began with simple cubes and extruded out the edges along a planar ref. I closely tried to follow my reference board for these meshes and kept their geometry similar to said references. 

However as a primarily high poly what mattered most was getting the scale, positioning and general shape correct. As these assets would be slid into my scene and placed in the engine. I would then be able to later on remove, update or keep it following texturing and unwrap as I saw fit. 

Final Collection of Assets)

As of this date there are around 50-60 unique models that take over the span of my 3 rooms. The bathroom being the least of the bulk of the load. Which up until now is the most I will have had to make ever in my projects so far keep in mind I have only made dioramas and exterior scenes until now. So I am a little bit intimidated by the count however I know these assets are easy to group and work on in different chunks. The first dividing category being room wise, as there is the primary front of house, kitchen and toilet sections. Furthermore with some tweaking I can cut down and try to get a lot of these assets to repeat between the front of the house and the kitchen. Eg plates, jugs, mugs, cutlery you name it. However some larger elements like the fridges are a bit too big and will need their own spread of sheets to unwrap them to scale.

Calendar Restructure and Asset List)

With the bulk of greyboxing done I have decided to restructure my calendar and try to keep everything managed and clean as possible. I have quite a lot of weeks remaining till submission so by pacing my assets in a weekly schedule, texturing and baking as such I can ensure I get a flurry of work done before formative and submitted deadlines. The main outlining factor is that a bulk of the work is subjected to my front of house assets eg the till, cutlery, plates, jukebox seats you name it. As such I have squeezed as much possible time to ensure I can work this to polish. But also include ample time to instance the works of interactivity and blueprinting later on. 

Closing Statements/Comments)

I am quite positive that I can deliver these assets to fruition in my calendar time. Call it optimism or just being on a long streak of listening to 70s rock and roll jams without pauses for a few days straight but I'm staying alive! And I will try to keep the following weeks updated best I can with this enormous workload. 

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Foliage and Designer Texturing (Week 5) (06/02/2023)

Modelling and Sculpting Foliage)

Hello my old friend Zbrush we meet once again. Yes that's right for this task I have settled on brushing off the metaphorically old vault of Zbrush skills I have amassed in the first year. Particularly that of character sculpting. However with brushes and moulding tools I want to create high detail cacti. As I have been struggling to get that same soft almost clay like control in other programs such as 3DsMax, I'm sorry bud. But let's not jump the horse. I will explain my process. I always plan out trims and non specific UV unwrap sheets like this with drawings. 

Modelling the Tall Cacti)

Texturing the Tall Cacti and Foliage)

I then created a tiling Designer cactus material that was further manipulated in Painter as a filling triplanar material of cactus across all saguaro (quite a funny name) cacti. In regards to the other foliage following vertex baking down I masked out the foreground from the background and began to paint in detail. I used rough brushes to try and give a dry look to all of it but also make most of the curvature map made to mask out areas of interest. Such as those little teeny tiny cacti dots that the smaller beavertail cactus has. Did I mention it was called beavertail? If that is not the cutest name for a cacti I don't know what is. Moving on.

Fixing Foliage Normals)

Following texturing and slapping textures back onto my planes the work was far from done. I still had to cut out the planes. And then lightly bend those planes for an illusion of depth. In foliage work you gotta group them as they will spawn in clumps so I made a few variances with more or else cacti/dry grass. The final polish was to bake normals of a half cut sphere on top of the groups. This helps solidify a more well rounded shade model of normals since it's mimicking the sphere rather than the planes. Pretty neat huh? Oh, I also painstakingly aligned the path with a set of spikes to cover the saguaro (tall cacti) cactuses on the sides since the profile was quite lacking without spikes. Then I sent it off to the engine.

Designer Materials) Trim Sheets, Walls and Ceiling

If you for any reason are allergic to spaghetti or messes of nodes look away now. Yup that's your final warning. Now that all those people have filtered out, have a look at my designer materials. I generally plan them according to the modular sets I made previously for the greybox so I realised that I would be able to fortunately group a lot of materials together. The bulkiest of them all being the trim sheet that coordinates the checker of the walls, wall panel, metal trim between wall and ceiling and a small slide of panelling that cushions the wall to ceiling. Whilst the result is pretty clean and values match up well the graph is the Mt Everest of mess since I had to compile and then mask the different materials and noises overtime to the final output. 

Worry not it is quite easier to follow along when you zoom into the individual colonies of well kept nodes however it is a monster zoomed out. Proceeding into my tiling materials I decided to keep it simple for much of the floor but did a lot of experimenting before settling on what I wanted. This is with a scraped floor that ended up looking too cartoony in nature when slapped into the engine. A great benefit of designers however is that much of the previous materials can be imported as outputs only and then used to work on top to keep matters a bit more cleaner. As is evident in my checker trim that I needed a little bit of side space to have a tiling black rectangle addition with the checkers being rotated.

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Importing Greybox Diner into Unreal Engine 4 (Week 4) (30/01/2023)

Further Research) More Diner Modular Elements

As said with the other week I am very much having a lot of fun with the diner project. So let's dive deeper into finding out more stuff about what I gotta model in and how things work. The first being the jukebox which I am quite confident on being able to model later on. Its model is a Wurlitzer 1015. The design of this beautiful beast is of pure madness considering it's capable of interchanging 24 tracks with A and B. And then play them on selection and put it back. Did I mention it doesn't have a micro computer? So it doesn't store this in memory it always knows and it does this through a staggering slew of switches, resistors and analogue pulleys that let it act like a computer before a computer. 

Truly a marvel and an engineer I gotta respect. Moving on from the coolest thing known to man, the kitchen and toilet rooms are elements I am equally excited to blast through since they share a lot of modularity. Meaning I can pull off a convincing amount of sinks, toilets, and stalls with a simple modular spread. Furthermore I can truly splash narrative into the kitchen and let the players know more into the lives of who may be working there, their culture and how things are done. Even the food they make and how it's prepared can all be found here. So I have assembled some core reference sheets that will definitely expand with time.

Importing into UE4) Project Setup

With my modular assets walls and more modelled out I was raring to see how they hold up on my sketched out floor plan. So I set their pivots accordingly and with snapping tests in 3DsMax passed I shot them into Unreal Engine 4. The export went mildly without issues as I did accidentally tick the auto conversion for units which Unreal did not like but when setting to CM on the FBX my scaling was finally amended. I quickly went dragging out and building the walls, followed by the floor and ceiling. I periodically tested this out in a first person point of view camera wise and also went back to my motel project to migrate completed assets. 

Shots and Light Pass 1)

Being my first full scale interior unlike my dioramas before I wouldn't be lying if I didn't say I was struggling considerably in getting the lighting right. For some reason the overall mood was hard to set with a decent performance light level. I did however play around with highlighting elements of the inworld ball lamps. I did realise with some feedback from my peers that I was beginning to treat the scene like an exterior with the fog that settled in at the end of the scene and the general darkness that outlooks the parking lot. This wasn't the exact vibe I was going for and realise that I will have to remove this.  Will have to look closer to see how light bounces off and is generally perceived with surfaces such as the checker floor to help bring my final textures closer to life. However I am quite fond of the general structure as it is matching up my to original inspirations (Dark.Exploration, 2021). In regards to the jukebox placement, long drawing boards and counter area with barstools.

Closing Statements/Comments)

Overall I am feeling much more confident with this than the motel. But once again there is much more to do. Additionally as much as narrative is concerned I am quite lacking in that department at the moment but with another 15 rewatches of Grease (Dark.Exploration, 2021). I am sure to find it eventually. As usual, stay tuned! And thank you for reading.

Bibliography:

(2021) Uncovering Abandoned 1950's Retro Diner | Everything eerily left behind . YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nndE-R5rRJU (Accessed: (30/01/2023)

(1978) Grease. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077631/ (Accessed: (30/01/2023)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Diner Greyboxing and Structure Design (Week 3) (23/01/2023)

Sketches to Greybox Structure)

Following watching copious amounts of diner touring in the US on YouTube (Dark.Exploration, 2021).  I sketched out my own floor plan. It's a simple diner that pulls much of its design from a classic diner cart. However much as it lets on in its wide nature I was able to fit in a flurry of men's and women's toilets that sit near the back and a kitchen that is sandwiched between the two. With due nature this is subject to change since I have yet to see how it is lighting and engine wise so I started to model. 

For modelling I wanted to aim for an easy to click and put together modular layout. So I analysed the walls and realised that much of the walls are reusable if not for subsections that are more rounded on the roof. By keeping those two elements separate I can construct an easy 3 piece modular wall and roof with a variant for letting a window be placed. I then made a wider middle window section which can be sandwiched between another modular window end.

Further Research) Furniture and Assets

As much as a diner cart can become quite recognisable with walls and ceilings alone I wanted to deep dive my research into furniture to get closer to my aesthetic feel of the 70s. After all this was quite a risky and rapid concept change so the more research I can go off the better to make choices for the next future weeks of development. Particularly I found that much of the furniture is repeatable and modular. Fortunately all I had to do was make sofas, sofa corner variants and their table counterparts. 

Considering this small pool of generalised modular furniture it did mean making them unique or narratively interesting will lead to having to consider making quite a deal of decals later on. Or possibly interchangeable textures that will provide different detail and effects. However textures are expensive so I will try my best to prioritise geometry costs and engine work rather than a flurry of textures.

Greybox Modelling)Furniture and FOH

Barstools and more familiar sitting chairs were also quickly modelled for greyboxing and geometry sake however I did leave them relatively mid-poly in stance of the barstool and sitting chair as to let them be used as a base later on. I want to experiment with making more mid polys to make production quicker to see placement in the engine. And if such props might be seen as not suitable or be changed for something else I did not reap a larger time cost as to make it low poly or really high poly and detailed. A particular asset I did enjoy greyboxing was the jukebox. I quickly realised that it's detailed nature but staple recognisability in the times of the 1970s rock and rolling culture means I cannot avoid making it. With my experience in detailed hard surface resembling props, the previous project being that of the Columbo typewriter, I am quite excited to be able to look forward to hopefully splashing out a more detailed and perhaps working variant in the future.

Feedback and Problems)

Despite being quick into modelling I did encounter my fair share of issues as I took a step back to consider my project as a whole. The first being that I was having a lot of fun making the diner. Like too much fun. So ultimately I will settle for this concept. With that what is to happen with the motel? Well fortunately I can still salvage exterior elements of my roads, dirt materials and hopefully fencework. However I will still have to curate foliage and other elements to make these assets blend in well and sit well with the diner. I also need to figure a way to have distant terrain without huge overbearing performance costs as my WorldMachine landscape unfortunately was killing my motel. I do not want to keep it for the diner so I still have more research to do. However I look forward to it so stay tuned!

Bibliography:

(2021) Uncovering Abandoned 1950's Retro Diner | Everything eerily left behind . YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nndE-R5rRJU (Accessed: (23/01/2023)