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)

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Final Concept Shift, and Diner Research (Week 3) (23/01/2023)

Concept Shift) Final Motel Experiments and Issues

With some advice from my teachers I explored an architecture style quite popularised in the 1960s called "Googie". Its large overarching shapes and dynamic edges made buildings stand out and unique. Which definitely drove high numbers for clientele and contained a driving optimism for futurism in its work. Furthermore and even more impressively perhaps was its pioneer by one small firm Amet & Davis Architecture (Davis, 2011). Through its design it's popularity even peaked to the influence of the very first Macdonald's that had stapling arches, neon framework and the double yellow M's that can still be found today. Anyways, enough of my love of the style the point is I really wanted to push this style into my building as I felt it could reach higher peaks of capitalising on the theme of aliens. However this is too when my greatest issues became more apparent.

The design of Googie didn't work for motels or habitual designs for a number of reasons. Primary of which being the rooftop drop and crazy side panels made sorting equal amounts of rooms difficult. Additionally the design was unrealistic to be able to provide good piping, air conditioning or placement of facilities that would prove useful. So despite a frivolous greybox being made and thrown into the engine I was at a loss of how to move forward. I personally was really struggling with the motel's exterior design and figuring out how to make it fun and interactive in a unique manner. As I soon discovered there already existed an alien themed gas station that made more sense to be found in the frivolous desert scale of Roswell . (Hammarbäck, 2019) So I decided to do something crazy.

Following the Heart) Diner Concept Research

I took 2 days to shoot back into an older concept from my variety of ideas I had at the start of the FMP. I knew that it would be risky, since if the concept doesn't work out or match similarly I would lose around 3 weeks of work. Including my exterior scape. However I had high expectations for it to work. My primary tell was I really loved musicals and Grease was the word. 

In a matter of time I managed to knock out a lot of core research and break the diner into a much more modular escape. Being an interior did mean I would have to accost 2 more rooms however being the first person I knew these could easily be a kitchen and bathroom suspecting. Which are not difficult nor long to develop. I would like to note a particular large influence that did help greatly in gathering these references, that being Matts Rad Show (Rad Show, 2018). Thanks to his marvellous first person account I got to experience the glory of visiting a diner (Mickey's Diner)  cart in its glory. As typical American diners past the 1960s originated from the primary concept of diner carts. 

These carts would be attached to trains to provide quick easy and hella greasy food to its passengers. This loving history carried into diners that became a staple of fast food in the later era of the 20th century. Thanks to pop culture and a lot of teenagers with bad hygiene but rocking dance moves the popularity soared and diner's were the place to be. I want to encapsulate this culture and experience. The high of milkshakes and greasy burgers, leather diner sofas and countertop seats. Not to mention the long drawl of the counter that loops up at the end to a classic jukebox playing rock and roll.

Bibliography:

Davis, A. (2011) Armet Davis Newlove and Associates, ADN Architects. Available at: http://adnarch.com/ (Accessed: (23/01/2023).

Hammarbäck, E. (2019) Artstation - Roswell, 1947 - unreal 4 environment, Roswell, 1947 - Unreal 4 Environment. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OyqZly (Accessed: (23/01/2023).

Matts Rad Show (2018) MICKEY'S DINER! SAINT PAUL MINNESOTA! - Classic American Diner! . YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9U4joVenDY (Accessed: (23/01/2023).

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Feedback and Narrative Shift (Week 2) (16/01/2023)

Substance Designer - Canyon, Dirt and Grass Materials)

I used some photos I took a while back of a cliff rock side on a beach. I then took this material into Photoshop to cut out the edges by offsetting the image by half. Using the content aware fill tool I was able to seamlessly patch up the rock and then use additional masks to move more of the rock about. After my Photoshop polishing I took the map into Designer adjusted its values further to mask out the cracks.

I played around with making it overall very neutral in colour since the canyons are all made of similar material with high detail normals to give a more detailed result. I then masked out all my greyscale maps in a channel pack to combine for easier engine work and exported it as a 2K map to maintain detail.

I ended up repeating similar processes for my other materials with varying amounts of mask work through levels and further noise application. Primarily in Design to get a greater breakup of material. 

Landscape) Terrain Materials And Setup)

I utilised my previous landscape node setup to replace the maps and update the materials over the height.  Fortunately this updated my landscape material quickly but I began to realise some masking issues emerged on my mountains. And so I had to manually overwrite the materials to correct some inconsistencies at the bottom of the mountain and have a smoother transition. Foliage was also procedurally generated atop this as I have yet to swap out the foliage array values. 

Texturing Road Mesh)

Since I already had placed and modelled a very low spec road previously I went to adding a more detailed texture atop. To help give it the maps and ground detail it needs to make it more interesting.  I began this process by first designing an asphalt material in Designer with low noise dirt maps and generally making it very rough and dry. I then exported and tiled it across my model in Painter with additional masks atop it to apply the paint. I ended up making these masks myself as the position could be changed out and applied as a black fill layer mask in Painter. I also looked into abiding by the highway code of the US and uncovered that there are a lot of similarities in the system for rules about overtaking over lines. However the stripes simply have a different colouring I’d assume for visibility. I also added a cluster of manual wear on to the pain and outer edge by adding more fill masks with painted edges as to recede the road into the dirt before exporting it out to the engine.

UE4 Road Splines)

I ended up changing up my road quite a bit to make it curl a lot more before hiding behind the landscape. I however ran into quite a lot of issues making the road blend well since the intersection had to be empty for two roads to merge. I ended up leaving this texture empty to give it space to apply further decals on top. I then amended any curves by manually adjusting spline positions should they need further fixing.

UE4 Lighting Pass 2)

For my second lighting pass I adjusted the complexity of my lights using channel masks since a lot of my zones unfortunately fell into the purple area/red. This meant the complexity was not efficient and had a lot of outstanding overlap. Furthermore a lot of individual lights from the fairy lights, overhead lamp posts and illuminated room lights brought more life to the scene. And so I went to implement this with appropriate attenuation radius to avoid overlap. The outside seating area was also quite dark so I added a lot more lighting to illuminate the bar area a bit more.

Narrative Changes)

As the weekend drew on I really wanted to revamp my narrative and henceforth narrative assets for 2 main reasons. The first being that the theme of detective and police enforcement felt quite stale since to me I had already made similar themes in a previous project. The secondary reason was that I struggled to conceptualise an interesting means of intractability without some level sequencer animation or cutscene that could explain the purpose of the cow body bag. Furthermore I kept the motel design the same but changed the narrative to be a lot more lighthearted. I also decided to delve deeper into the design and menu of the local bar allocated at the motel. I ended up themeing a lot of aspects after planet names, stars and galaxy names like the Andromeda bar. I think that by adding more life to the small details I can add more reasonings for certain drinks and aspects to be found in other parts of the scene as they would have been sold there.

Narrative Shift in UE4)

To help visualise these changes I quickly modelled some more low poly assets to demonstrate the importance of the pool, the fallen cow in a  floatie and the lounging aspect of the sunshine. Since the level sequencer cutscene would fade to black to showcase the cow dropping from the ufo, I would have to model the after cow simply in the pool and add appropriate sfx to provide narrative. I also made the pool a lot deeper and added better stepping on the sides for those wanting to get from the bar to the lounging area. For the future I want to add more detailing to the doors, since each suite would have a different theme in terms of rooms available. For example Saturn suits are better suited for families hence the ring, and the mars suite is for singles only having one bed. 

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Spline Setup and UE4 Lighting Pass 2 (Week 2) (16/01/2023)

Modelling Smaller Props)

As I still had some time to experiment with other greyboxing assets as my calendar timetable had delegated I went to modelling some low poly simplistic props. These in topology were quite unoptimised however had shape and value through materials that proved to be helpful to set dress my greybox a bit more with clutter and storytelling. I wanted to add more chaos and cluster with trash, cans and tires to show wear and rough wear to the environment around in the sheer volume of trash collecting up. 

Modelling Fallen Garbage)

Taking these meshes, I then used a Rigidbody simulation in 3DSMax to make them fall and collide lightly to scatter automatically. This would greatly help placement since the entire scatter would be under one mesh and so would mean all I had to do was place that set around. It would also greatly cut down on draw calls. Whilst still for a greybox I did want to keep performance highly in mind. With sufficient sub object material on to ensure the correct props could be different applied in the engine I then exported and adjusted this mess pile to unreal with a better ground plane.

Concepting Alien Sign)

Since my previous Grease inspired sign no longer corresponds with my design I went forward to change up the overall design but keep minimal elements. These elements would be the general font face and glow methods of the text alongside the white interchanging text box. I experimented a bit with values and then went on to add the saucer and alien elements, strike the paranormal themes in. The yellow thunder beneath the saucer being a nod to typical beaming lights seen in alien abductions. At the bottom of the sign is also a flat cutout of a cow which in the order of the sign would have been taken up into the saucer. Another nod to typical tales of missing cattle and odd crop circles. The quote present on the end concept design was also taken from the X-Files, a prominent message before every episode. Whistl I believe it definitely didn't start in the X-Files I think of it as a good homage to a nod to general paranormal speculation.

Fixes) Moving the Motel Forward

An issue I had encountered before was the motel felt too far back. It made seeing elements harder in the greybox and my previous lighting passes since everything was so pushed back. So I went to delete some elements of the right wing and drag everything closer to the road. This did simplify its design and since the American road network operates on the wrong side regardless, commuters could still access the motel but getting a bit closer and directly turning in rather than beforehand. I also had  a lot more ease in posing the camera due to these aspects. 

Modelling) Adding Pool and More Spline Structure

To lighten the space a bit more and have more variety in materials for the inner ring I decided to add a pool. Its shine and design would definitely impart more focus for the player whilst additionally serving as a more resort of a motel for holiday goers invested in the paranormal or soldiers from the local military base that need a break with families with a palace to stay. I also used this opportunity to prepare some spline meshes for fairy lights as they would help resolve my lighting issue by having just a bit more overhead lighting. The spline fairy light was a simple long spread of spherical meshes with differentiating materials to help make specific elements glow. I also made a few variations with and without fairy lights in varying positions but still keeping the general dimensions to replace the mesh and give more variety in the engine.

Modelling Mega Scans and Splines)

With some advice from my tutors I took a couple of mega scans for environment assets e.g. rocks, barrels, traffic cones and materials to help get a better feel for concepts. And to see what works and what does not visually in set dressing. I also use this time to set up my spline workflow and blueprints, by utilising a helpful guide for my tutor Pat I could construct a more complex boolean pipeline. I used these scripts to control if the second spline mesh would be the same or another, to adjust control of points of overlap to close any awkward gaps and randomise my fairy lights for example. All my blueprints can be seen here below in function.