Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Greybox Modelling  (Week 1) (09/01/2023)

Modelling - Building Block Out)

To begin my blockout I used a lot of base square shapes to get the scale of the building. Soon I began to realise just how much space I had since the total square foot of the building would prove to be less than a quarter of the 150 by 150 metre limitation imposed by the brief. This proved to be helpful since I did want to establish the feel of abandonment and discovery upon a rundown place. I then began to block in more details from a more sky based view of the building, taking heavy inspiration from a variety of satellite Google Map pictures especially the 4 Aces Movie Motel Ranch. The design was broken into 3 buildings since the ranch also includes a diner; however , I opted to add more living space by expanding this area into another floor. I also went to work blocking out the previously concepted sign to get a feel for the neon design and general effects in Unreal. I used a lot of primitive shapes and cut into my concept to bring out some shapes and elements. Fortunately 3DSMax has text tools which I was able to utilise with my font choice to make slimmer lining of “bulbs”. 

Terrain) World Machine And Foliage)

To get a feel for Worldmachine I did play around a bit with it over the December break. As seen here I instanced a rough mountains world with MegaScan textures into Unreal Engine and set up a base world material that would act as a masking agent. I figured out here that by using an array of foliage actors I could easily apply and add procedural foliage that would severely optimise performance. A critical issue I had beforehand when making my forest personal scene and had a lot of trouble rendering with low frame rates due to the sheer scale of foliage. The foliage array has a variety of tools that can tweak rendering maximum distance and other culling properties. However generally I uncovered that WorldMachine with its node based method of generating terrain and extracting height masks. I would then drop materials onto the height masks to apply grass onto subsections of the dirt and even paint in further detail should I need further control in level. 

UE4 Setup of Greybox)

I began in a fresh blank project and imported my terrain canyons I had played around with previously. I then directly dropped my mass exported greybox building structures on top to see what the best spot was to flatten out the terrain and hold the motel. I then added a third person controller to walk around the level and get a further grip of scale, fortunately the building was to scale of the controller but provided difficult and very narrow to navigate. 

Modelling Greybox Car)

Since the car proved to be of high narrative importance to my scene I wanted to model in a suitable low poly greybox car. I could then set up lights surrounding the headlights and rear lights to have a better understanding of how I can get my first lighting pass onto my scene and if there's other assets I might have to greybox onto. I started with base square planes and wrapped them around by extruding their overall shape by the outline as I was fortunate enough to find planar reference images of the side of the vehicle I wanted to model. I then took to refining the front and back by slightly pinching the cage of a FFD4 Modifier. I realise that for aerodynamics the car side body doors are on level with a light curve to allow airflow. The top however is a bit smaller to allow further coverage of the glass. The tires luckily were all the same styling and I was able to symmetry them across. Whilst not perfect it was suitable in size and dimension to serve as a greybox asset to help look car enough for my scene.

UE4 Lighting Pass 1)

I slapped on a greyscale Colour Look Up Table (LUT) onto my post processing and began to light my scene. I added a lot of preliminary lights to try and capture the bounce of neon signs but tried to keep it quite dark. By utilising the LUT I was able to see the grayscale values and impart focus onto the areas that served the most significance to the narrative such as the UFO when it comes shining down. However I also realise that without it the lighting proves to be extremely dark so I will continue to work on this aspect. 

Issues And Problems Encountered

I realised rather quickly that issue began to arise the minute I disabled my post processing. Whilst excellent in grey, the materials did not hold up in colour in the limelight. I had dropped a lot of odd values and with the provided colour of lights such as the car rear reds and bright high beam yellows the scene was quite distasteful to look at. The foliage I had also temporarily dropped over was very green and did not suit the surrounding area below. Complexity also began to strike me as I got some feedback and began to realise just how difficult some assets might be due to my inexperience in the past modelling them. Such as the vehicle, which in itself was of high importance to narrative but to get one right would take quite the amount of weeks and trial and error. So with this in mind I moved a lot of assets to my stretchgoals list and took to researching better lighting and spline tools for my road and more.

Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project  - Brief Analysis and Concepts (Week 1) (09/01/2023)

Brief Analysis and Limits)

Hello there! Ever since Christmas I have been hard at work thinking about my final major project however I haven't been able to get hold of the brief since a bit after. So to begin I will run through my initial thoughts on the brief. I was quite excited to read that both interior and exteriors were accepted, however for interiors there was an enacted limitation of 3 rooms. My original idea was to do a diner and I soon realised as my first concept, it would prove difficult to do exactly that since, apart from the dining area and kitchen the most I could do for a third room would be the toilets. Not exactly thrilling to be modelling for 18 weeks. However on a positive note I think the 18 weeks is sufficient to work out a larger concept in the exterior nature and since my personal projects have taken this route I want to further expand my portfolio to the outside and do some foliage work.

Concept 1 - American Diner)

As previously stated my first concept was that of a 1970s diner. I love the flair of the era especially with the metal and plastic sheets for roofing and walls not to mention blazing red leather for seats. The tiling checkerboard floor was also a nice touch and with my previous modelling of a typewriter, I really wanted to get to modelling a jukebox that would be similarly animated in nature and quite interactive as per one of the briefs specifications. However with the interior 3 rooms being a requirement I soon realised that it would be best left to a personal project as I was struggling to find a plausible manner to fit more rooms into a already tight space. The design of a diner was to be accessible after all and cheap. Which is why they were so frequent in the 70s-80s. 

Concept 2 - Route 66 Motel Exterior)

I then went on to look at interesting exteriors, and landed upon the desert escape of Route 66. I really loved the foliage and rock formations of desert canyons and figured the materials and sculpts would prove a great challenge. Onto the building however with the large space I wanted to make the neon standout in the midst of the canyons. Hence an old style motel from a similar era of the diner 70s. I chose Route 66 since it was the first interstate highway to attract travellers all the way from the East to Los Angeles. With over 2000 miles of road its reputation has solidified itself in history and to make a motel would be respectable of such nature and design. I wanted to look further and design something of the era however I was beginning to struggle narratively.

Concept 3 - Old Crows Church)

Which is why I also wanted to explore a completely different concept to see if a break from the Americas might spark some ideas. I ended up going with another exterior set in the woodlands of the scottish hillside. A more mournful atmosphere with themes of death and rebirth from a church abandoned in the woods. Its resident crows would signify the stark balance of life and death through their nests and life they have brought to an otherwise abandoned place. I also wanted a bit of a excuse to animate birds. However I think of this concept to also be quite dark and interesting considering the wear and story to tell within the church. However I was struggling to find a ground for the interactive aspect since I wouldn't want to risk modelling exterior and interior over the course of 18 weeks. Considering such a challenge I haven't done before I didn't want to risk a drastic move now. So I kept this idea for a possible future personal project.

Final Concept Roswell Motel)

My final concept once again returned to the Americas with the deserted motel. However I wanted to draw more narrative inspiration from paranormal elements since the setting would prove to be a perfect place for UFO sightings and other mysterious circumstances. So I began to draw in a nearby air base concept, roads only to showcase this and the motel would hold a mystery of a deceased cow/human that had unspeakably reappeared here. Chalk lines and large enforcement vehicles would light up the inner parking. With the neon light signs still functioning somewhat for electromagnetic charge. Personally I really wanted to draw in from the clues and presentation of the investigative work in the X-Files. A marvellous TV series I have recently been getting sucked into and heavily inspired by.

Planning And Time Management)

With a mysterious paranormal concept in mind I wanted to outline my personal calendar and week to week list of tasks to ensure I work sufficiently until the deadline. I also wanted to break up my large project pipeline into 3 main chunks, environment, modularity and narrative. After having these 3 elements I wanted to give suitable week to week breakups for modelling, unwrap/bake with texturing up until the final weeks. Where the focus would shift more onto blueprinting, engine work and polish. To make up for any lost time or possible dates where I would have personal responsibilities, I have added an additional week until submission that is free of any specific tasks and have stuck to giving most weekends off to try and stave off crunch. However I do realise I have a bad tendency to overscope my concepts so every few weeks I have amended a period to assess the project and make any cuts/culling to assets should I be unable to make them in time to sufficient standard.

Further Research - Environment)

With my calendar blocked out I went to look further into the deserted canyon environment of New Mexico. I figured to theme it more appropriately to Aliens I would take heavier research into the state specifically as per the Roswell Incident of 1947. Which had a top secret weather balloon drop in the small town of Roswell that soon was linked closely to aliens. With its onboard technology capable of discovering soviet nukes, the US military covered it up too suspiciously which led to mass speculation of the only other possible circumstance; aliens. Roswell is situated in New Mexico, alongside the Walker Air Base so I themed the surrounding dune area appropriately. I began to break up the different shades of rock and sand into materials of 3 gradients; canyon reds, dusted light sands and darker grassy patches. With my previous personal project exploring the woodlands I learned that having a flat green material below grass ultimately made the environment feel more natural since it blended it better than dirt. So I will most likely have to do a similar blend for my patchy dried grass and green cacti trees.

Further Research - Modular Elements)

Into my modular elements, motels are luckily made of simplistic building materials in light shades to stave off the desert sun. Surrounded by power lines, cables and signage that is highly modular. I would also have cans, trash bags and bottles to litter the place with more life not to mention typical white plastic chairs and tables. I can add wear to these with dust and grain or generally discolour them since the sun would act as a mass bleaching agent in the sky. I feel I can also have a lot of fun exploring decal wear as well on the ground tracks and wall paint flaking.damage to help tell age of the motel in its state of functional disrepair,

Further Research - Narrative Elements)

With my previous aforementioned X-Files influence I wanted to include aspects of guns, old tech and case files scattered about to ground the presence of police/fbi investigators into my scene. Additionally I could model a base car and utilise it for both making the parking lot seem more busy with other vehicles and a new coat of paint to adapt it to a sheriff car as a narrative modular set piece. Considering however I have 18 weeks I do have to ensure all assets are to a similar polished standard as I do not want to risk having the scene looked off with particular important elements. Not to mention the UFO that I would like to appear animated and hovering over the scene before disappearing as an interactive set piece. Whilst Relatively easy in shape with cylinders and spheres I haven't done too much hard surface sci-fi in assets beforehand. Which means I  definitely need to set aside some time to get the appropriate design down for it when I get to modelling it. 

Grease Themed Concept - Old)

Moving onto my concepting, prior to my X-Files craze I did settle up on setting the motel to be more Grease themed and began my first round of concepting for a sign that is affluent of the old timey neon motel shine. I used elements of the car from Grease, Grease Lightning to construct the dash background and the wheel rim with thunder to once again ground it to Grease. However, one element I will most likely ascertain as a stretch goal due to its design is the gas station element, since in 18 weeks adding a gas station might prove to be quite the stretch goal. Considering textural elements are completely different. I might even extend this to a personal project so I can give it the appropriate time I need without constraints and budgetary limitations.

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 1 & 2 ) Project Final Renders and Job Research (Week 13) (26/12/2022)

Job Research, Analysis and Portfolio Analysis)

As January draws nearer, I began to look into job roles and opportunities around me. Due to my location I was luckily able to seek out quite a lot of companies revolving around the Leamington Spa area in particular that might work best for my interest. However since I also hold a driving licence I am not limited in my search. My interests and my strengths definitely lie within that of environment design. And as such I made a private sheet of careers recruitment pages to check in the coming weeks to apply towards. Through my research I also realised it was best to have my strongest works on show with a cleancut portfolio and went to design a new banner for my Artstation. Alongside adding my LinkedIn page, be sure to follow me :D. 

Final Renders)

Here are my final renders for the two projects, I also have an additional rerender of my personal project available on my Artstation main page. Be sure to check it out!

Fruit Cart)

(Unfortunately I have been unable to upload the video for my Fruit Cart due to "conversion errors" onto Artstation so please checkout my Artstation post to view it instead)

Columbos Captain's Desk)

Project Pitfalls and Final Sign Off for the New Year)

In summary the two projects have definitely made me feel more focused and comfortable with the environment design pipeline. I realise as a very narratively based person from my weekly run ins of Dungeons and Dragons I want to expand my repertoire to share stories for players to interact with in games and by pursuing this job role I will be able to better improve the quality of these worlds/assets in a larger team. However by having tighter industrial briefs I realise there are a lot of time considerations, realistic aspects of production and more that affect this limitless process of narrative design. A pipeline I want to focus my experience onto next is hard surface and more foliage work as I feel that I haven't been able to explore these in a professional setting much rather than my personal work and having such skills assessed would help me create more higher quality assets. I hope to bring these developments in my blog and I can’t wait for what the new year will bring. 

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 2 ) Adding SFX (Week 12) (19/12/2022)

Music to Scene and SFX)

Upon rendering my scenes in level sequencer, I realised that I could further pull realism to the piece and environment by adding some sound effects and ambience to the current environment. As such I have considered not only what would make noise, but what would draw individuals to stay focused on the importance of the piece. Such as light narrative cues. However I too knew that these effects would have to be within looping limitations and as such have attempted to either a) source looping sounds effects or take them myself or b) use Audacity/Adobe Audition to amend any discrepancies. 

Fruit Cart - Wind ambiance, water drips from drain, and light music crackling vinyl jazz from the interior of the open window.

Columbos Office -  Rotary phone ringing, typewriter key press, typewriter ding and motion and light Columbo backing track from music followed by “just one more thing”. 

Problems and Issues with Audio)

Unfortunately it was much easier said than done to apply the audio to my scene. As I managed to find royalty free sources of audio, I had a lot more challenges in the process of exporting it back out of Unreal Engine. Level sequencer for some reason failed to export in-game audio and required me to resync and apply the tracks on the level sequencer cutscene. However after some testing with this in rendering it still failed to show up. So I had to break my process down into 2 steps, the first was rendering out the cutscenes in Level Sequencer for the visual aspect. And the second being using OBS to record the audio in game and resync it. I used Adobe Premier to resync the audio. And after some careful cuts and fine tunings it ended up coming out pretty similar to the in-game experience which I was quite pleased with. Additionally for my portfolio variant, due to copyright issues I have not included the planned vinyl track of Frank Sinatra's “Fools Rush In” for submission but will include it on my Artstation.

Bibliography:

Ceiling Fan Sound Effect | Fan sound SFX | Real sound | Copyright Free Sound (2021) YouTube. Real Sound . Available at: https://youtu.be/EBPEuzJGDDM (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Columbo and his one more thing (2020) YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_d6_CdNEVA (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Columbo TV Series - Background Music (2016) YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVP6onBEVRg (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Fools Rush In (2014) YouTube. Frank Sinatra. Available at: https://youtu.be/yWJpxExs_xQ (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

ROYALTY FREE TYPEWRITER SOUND EFFECTS! ORIGINAL 1960 SMITH & CORONA TYPEWRITER SOUNDS (2017) YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHZqZ1yoRPo (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Typewriter Bell (2020) YouTube. rabinoco. Available at: https://youtu.be/XcdZmJ35shE (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Victorian City | Ambience | 2 hours (2019) YouTube. Ambience Lab. Available at: https://youtu.be/iQWnyYAoosM (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Old Rotary Phone Ringing ☎️ Free Sound Effect SFX (2019) YouTube. mycompasstv. Available at: https://youtu.be/p530Stpz11U (Accessed: December 20, 2022).

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 1 & 2 ) Amending Feedback, VFX and Post Process (Week 11) (12/12/2022)

Applying Feedback)

Feedback as previously discussed is a crucial and important step of polishing. I was fortunately in a spot where I could amend, remove and even create new assets with a few weeks of leeway to get my projects up to standard. Unfortunately for myself though my first brief, Fruit Cart was fairly limiting in its texel density and as such I did not have the budget for more assets despite wanting to add them into the scene. However this does not exclude my artstation posts which are in themselves the best rendition of said textures, meshes and more. With feedback and general personal project polish I know I can get all my projects up to par with being on my portfolio with good standing.

Large Scale Texture Fixing in Fruit Cart)

I had a lot of fixes to amend and polish my work and to begin with I settled back upon the fruit cart. By base I realised some of the textures and smoothing groups on the fruits/crates did not match. Which when shaded with lighting furthered the issues. To amend this I went back to Substance Painter to mask out any noisy normals and used a colour picker to matchap any values that did not match all fruits. This issue primarily occurred in my roughness and base colour between 2 key sheets. As I was stuck texturing some fruit in crates and the remaining solo individual fruits with additional crate baking in another, I had not aligned values well and based them primarily on my memory. With photo reference I fixed this fairly quickly.  More near the back and surrounding walls I faved another larger issue surrounding my brickwork texture. The roughness and general material was fairly poorly constructed so I went back to the drawing board of Substanc eDesigner to clean up the roughness channels, base colour and add normal differences in depth for my height map to further exude. For understanding how the materials and maps should align I used another's Photoscan/Designer Material as reference to analyse the greyscale and base colour channels before exporting. The difference in the visual side of things is substantial. 

Render Polishing and Post Processing)

With the commented ambient feedback and bounce light issues I had suffered on Columbos Office diorama I decided to also bring more light to my Fruit Cart scene. I knew that my cine cameras did also suffer some issues when rendering in level and I was fortunately able to figure out the cause of the bugs I encountered. Predominantly a lot of conflict existed between the post process blending bias between the cine cameras own personal settings and my unbound post processing layer. By setting this value at lower or higher values I could manipulate the light back to suitable gained levels as such in my screenshot renders. I could also use this as a means to add a focal point and blur out objects that hung too close to the foreground to the camera. 

Amending the Chair and Other Textures in Columbo’s Office)

By turning down the viewport and viewing my maps individually I uncovered a lot of my roughness channels could be improved on assets such as the cigar, corkboard wall and chair. Not mentioning the entirety of the leather wallet material was strangely all classified as alongside very glossy. So I went back to the primary texture sheets for these props and larger chair/wall texture to fine tune these masks back to appropriate values alongside more interesting texture in the case of the cigar. Generally during the wooden encasing and adding a more realistic paper thin wrap for encasing the internal nicotine. In the case of the chair I went back to playing with more and less roughness/wear around the arms and backside. Which with wear lightened the gloss atop of the chair, wore down to the lighter values and overall made it more discoloured. 

Cigarillo Smoke Lines)

I was quite stuck at creating a suitable particle to drag up and not only wisp but coil similarly to a realistic trail towards my ceiling fan. Fortunately I was able to cross reference a tutorial made by Tim Engelke (Engelke, 2020) that was made for cigarettes. I followed along and made my individual adjustments before scaling up the trails to match the height of my cigar. I then duplicated the effect to form a few more trails. As seen here.

My Current Renders)

Here are my current renders, as you can see I have applied and fine tuned them with more feedback for all my projects. However with my calendar in consideration and my available timespan till submission of around 3 weeks I know I can hit some stretch goals. And so I will do my best with the festivities next week to try and add more to my scenes. 

Bibliography)

Engelke, T. (2020) Create smoke trails in UE4 (Material & Niagara), Medium. Medium. Available at: https://timengelke.medium.com/create-smoke-trails-in-ue4-material-niagara-5cdc1fbf0c1e (Accessed: December 12, 2022). 

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 1 & 2 ) Formative Presentation and Feedback (Week 10) (05/12/2022)

Fixing Lighting - Fruit Cart) 

With the leadup to my formative presentation I decided to take my knowledge from my most recent project, Columbos Office diorama and redo some aspects of lighting upon my previous project. As seen above the main differences are with the density of lighting alongside utilising a better range of values to settle onto realistic lighting conditions. As originally this was the vision I have had for presenting the Fruit Cart and went on to apply more shadowed areas where no light would realistic outreach from the window. Furthermore, limiting the outreach and values spread of the lantern light as the surrounding rough areas should not have given it so much bounce light in comparison to the wall. To also amend the lighting I changed my alpha map on the emissive window mask as it was heavily bleeding not just into the curtain but surrounding frame. Which proves once again unrealistic in concurrent conditions and very unconstrained in its bleeding effect. So I worked back to limit the zone and introduced a light touch gradient instead to give more variety to the value as naturally the ground below would prove to be darker than that of the closer ceiling to said light source, within the room. 

Fixing Lighting and Modelling - Personal Project)

Taking tips and tricks from my Columbo and Fruit Cart I also went to amend a personal project of mine I had challenged myself to curate to learn the proper means to creating foliage. This being my Glowing Forest Environment, which felt heavily stylised/fantastical in nature whichever does not fit my current presentation. I went by first taking much of the directional light out of the scene and adding a volumetric fog to cast light beams into the scene. I also utilised my previously created greyscale value LUT for Columbo to help compare values, and used post processing to further downscale elements of disinterest/heavy noise in value from my scene. Wanting the sole focal point to be that of the deer, I also amped up the highlight values and saturation for this on my glowing niagara VFX. 

However I too realised that lighting wasn't the core issue, as my scene lacked a solid narrative to the deer and why it was imposed in this forest. So I did some deep diving into Gods and realised that deer have a symbolic influence upon that of the Japanese mythos as “messengers of the gods' '. Furthermore I went on to model and texture a Shinto shrine gate and add some ofudas related to themes of faith, good luck and deer god “Ame-no-Kaku”. I also added decals into the dirt and scaled the values to make it seem as though the deer, whilst ethereal in nature still trod onto the dirt with a clear path.

Making and Presenting - Formative)

Making my presentation, I assembled my best shots and blog post snippets into a Microsoft Powerpoint. I knew that I wanted to focus on how I have improved, but leave a lot of detailing on my process in said slides to reference back too. This was also the time I uncovered that my blog was pretty heavy in content, with over 19 posts and sporting 30,000+ words. So by utilising this method I felt it was a lot more simplified. I also included video where I could as the visual in scene renders could only show so much as static high res screenshots. Prepared with a synopsis of points I presented and personally think it went pretty smoothly however, I did go over the time limit heavily. And I feel if I left a lot more to the visual side of things than talking, more input could have been given on what to amend. On the contrary this is not to state that the feedback was not highly insightful and resourceful as I mention below.

My given feedback upon all projects was as follows: 

The cigar trails prove too unrealistic as puffs rather than long trails. There is no wind wisp to the fan direction from the stated cigar. Need to be mindful of my personal timetable as there is a full week of non-work in my amended calendar. Generally adding more wear to that chair, wood wear specifically to my chair and lighten the leather to a green to match the table. Additionally increase the bounce light on the fans and ambient indirect light in the scene as total to add more indirect bloom across all assets. 

I will amend this in the following week alongside general housekeeping of my digital files as I prepare to return home for the holidays.

Calendar of Work Over December)

As previously mentioned in my feedback my calendar was quite jam packed within the presentation and I had unfortunately lost a full week to other affairs during my 4 week buildup to submission. With considerations in the works I have amended and made a more lax calendar primarily focusing on some stretchgoals I want to add and possibly polish for these projects. Applying light preparation and concepting for my final major project as I come back on the closest weeks. 

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 2 ) Captains Table Environment - Project Write Up and Summary for Formative (Week 9) (28/11/2022)

Feedback and Further Changes)

As stated in the previous week I have been fine tuning my cameras and value setup to make my models look best from a more cinematic approach. As such I have scrapped a lot of my preliminary setup from the greyboxing stage but am happy to say have learnt a lot about lighting in the process. A classmate has showcased how important channels are to adding unnecessary bounce light around a scene and removing performance costs in the process by doing so. However I also ended up changing a lot about my level sequencer setups as well as simply leaving the scene running felt more dynamic than zooming around as I have done previously. I ended up having to slow some animations in the process as I felt and was told they were too erratic. 

Beauty Shots)

Front View - In this shot I wanted to capture a looming view of the desk from the perspective of a Columbo. His stature peering over the chair perhaps doubling back at some of his evidence on the desk. It's a clean spread that showcases the different levels of mess but guides the eye towards the focal point of the lamp, and further the typewriter with value contrast.

Desk Close Up - In this shot I wanted to show off all the inner details on paperwork, photographs and notes. With a much more dynamic angle framing the typewriter and phone with reflective light.

Videos In Engine)

In Scene Desk Preview - This video clip showcases my animative work from a more cinematic view up top before enclosing a close up of the desk. Similar to my previous render. The typewriter, phone ringing and fan are all animated at different points to create a more relaxed detective atmosphere. 

In Scene Room Preview - This secondary video clip captures a more wide angle shot of the space around, encapsulating larger details such as the corkboard and Mrs Melville painting. These larger assets detail more key narrative points as to the particular Columbo episode alongside murder motive.

More Beauty Shots)

Corkboard Close Up - By far the largest asset in the scene, I imagine this to be a regular visiting spot for Columbo. To pin and dot evidence, scribble down notes and try to visualise the crime. As such with the years the board has light discoloration, wear and tear and yellowing.

Full Desk View - I wanted to experiment with a more dramatic framing, overhead directly viewing all contents of the desk. This shot renders that, alongside the full mess that Columbo has accumulated in clues, books and champagne bottles.

Room View - Encapsulating the furthest angle from the desk, a point of view of Columbo just entering the space from a day of intensive detective work. Wider angle shots are more muddied in value, however the contrast still pulls interest to the desk lamp and typewriter. The latter being a key point of evidence of who killed Jim Ferris.

Scene Texture Breakdown - Showcasing all elements of texturing, lighting and map work I had done for my assets I have included this handy breakdown. As seen I have left no roughness value unturned and have maximised my metallic usage to render furniture true to life. 

Modular Asset Breakdown - Showcasing a view of all assets in scene, whilst fortunately my texture sheets allow me to make a variety of meshes of similar proportion, by simply swapping out the UV space. I also made more complex piles, stacks and hordes of meshes to cut down on drawcalls.

Project Wrap Up and Evaluation)

In summary I can say that the Columbo office was a pleasure to work on. It was not only a large excuse to rewatch copious amounts of the best detective show from the 80s but to learn from digging into realism. I have instilled good habits in my modelling and texturing to push for that extra accuray in reference planes and alphas. In total I believe I have over 60 alpha maps I used in Substance Painter alone for this project. Additionally writing and falsifying records of evidence let me build the narrative just as fine tuned as I wanted it. To help tease and bring attention to one Ken Franklin, suspicious jovial co author of Mrs Melville. Some large standing lessons I have learnt however are of Unreal Engines post processing and cinematic tools. Beforehand all my scenes suffer from too much dark value. To help bring them back to life I would have to raise a copious amount of lights into the scene. However this would bring about problems of baking shadows and performance. As such I would then re enter the loop of cutting down on said lighting, dimming the scene. Through using post processing I can raise gain, tone and saturation of any shadows and highlights as I choose. Giving me more freedom in how my lights correspond through the camera. Not only mentioning the cinematic camera tools to help blend focus on assets in centre shot and the 3 x 3 grid for posing my shots. This project definitely has had its pitfalls, especially in the animation department. But from all mistakes I have learnt my fair share and will put all this knowledge towards my FMP.

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 2 ) Captains Table Environment - Decals and Animation (Week 8) (21/11/2022)

Working on Feedback - Decals and Polishing)

Following my feedback the other day I decided to work on quite a lot of polishing towards my textures. I added more decals towards the environment, focusing on capturing the dirt and mess of Columbo’s footsteps. Following having to track through the woodlands to find Ken Franklin's cabin in the episode. I would imagine Columbo would not be the type of character to have time to settle down and wipe his boots but rather add more evidence to ponder over his desk. Furthermore consdering the smoking age of the era I added wall damage to the paint as I would imagine both yellowing and peeling with cracks concurring on the poor paintjob over countless cigar filled days filling the room as Columbo tries to figure out the murderer. I also wore down the chair by scraping more lighter values of a leather texture on top and applying a similar fill mask to my roughness channel. Before reporting the new maps back into UE4.

Decals - Creating Alphas and Streamlining Master Materials)

As previously mentioned I had added numerous decals to my scene to help captivate more detail and unique flair to my tiling materials. However previously I had constructed decals using only Substance Designer and Photoshop for alpha and detail work. Which felt very inorganic in shape and form alongside design being seamless. So I instead opted to export out a plane, of which was unwrapped completely flat filling the space. This plane would act as a base for accessing the numerous fill and paint tools Substance Painter has to utilise. Furthermore I used fill masks with alphas of footsteps, dirt brush piles and cracks to simulate the necessary colour/roughness/normal maps I would need. To help streamline this, I used a variety of folders as well to wipe the opacity slate clean for adding more decals. Back in the engine I set up a master material with parameter texture assets to simply drag and drop instances of my finished and exported decals to the slots. As previously I had used the tiling method with a texture set instance that would crop/mask out the areas unused by other decals. In retrospect I believed this would be saving on cost as only one large texture map would be required. However the nodes required to crop and process out the unnecessary features alongside the fact it was also material instances at the end of the day meant I could have streamlined/simplified this a lot quicker by having unique maps. With detrimentally no big performance changes. 

Setting up Glass Shader)

Throughout the days I have spent countless hours fine tuning and coaxing different methods of shading my cigar tray. My primary and first attempt at a glass shader much like the window pane glass was simple, translucent and had a refractive value just enough to distort its underside. However for my ashtray I needed dirt, grime and haze from the cigars to come through. And went back to reincorporate a technique that  blends worldspace coordinates of different faces to apply a dirt texture smoothly, similarly akin to a triplanar fill method in Substance Painter. However with the refractive properties of the glass I could not isolate the areas of dirt and would see them from angles suffer from the same distorted effect. This is not realistic unfortunately and as such I went through lots of different tuning of values and iterations. Finally settling on an overall more opaque ashtray, with minimal refractive properties and isolating roughness/opacity values for the dirt colour to come stronger through. Furthermore adding a decal below to apply a firm dirt spot for the cigar bits. 

Creating Light - Office Light Fixture)

One stretch goal I was happy to incorporate and fit in was the office fan light fixture. As suggested by my peers the room had no realistic means of being that bright from the front on perspective and as such I took this further to add a fan light. Typical of offices of the time and modern in either home or precinct. I also wanted to have the ability to add simple animation and by simply modelling the blades separately I knew I could realistically accomplish this stretch goal. So I went on to utilise reference pictures to model a low poly variant of the fans with square boxes as base meshes. Extruding the sides out and adding additional swift loops to round off the edges. I knew I only had to model the centre plane and a single blade as their position would be fairly dark so a repetitive fan blade shouldn't be too noticeable. 

Additionally I wanted to minimise how much space would be used up on another texture sheet since this would act as its own unique asset. Following simple turbosmooth on my finished asset, rounding of edges and applying vertex paint as demonstrated before. I was quickly able to export it to Substance Painter for baking and texturing. Not too much detail was basked here as the meshes were relatively similar but I knew I needed many maps to help apply further masking such as edge damage and wear through a fill editor. I would then paint the colour differences and smooth out any extra detailing through masks that would stick towards vertex paint. I was easily able to also colour drop opacity onto my small pulley chains that would control the light and spin of the fan. Another key map detail I added was that of the emissive channel. Through this map I was able to control the glow that typical office fans have. However with Columbos fan I wanted to really push the dirt, damage and beating this poor fan would have suffered being the highest vantage point for cigar smoke to affect. As such the outer ring does not glow and the primary point of light is on the edge of the cone. Due to smoke dwelling upwards and making its way to rest any tar/residue on the outer ring rather than centre of the bulb.

Animation - Telephone, Light Fixture and Typewriter)

With primary meshes such as the typewriter being high in detail and structure I knew that I could easily purpose animation into my work. By animating assets I really wanted the scene to become believable and realistic as almost as such Columbo was just stepping away for one more thing. So I went on to purposely go through many hurdles to understand the process of animating props. My prior knowledge, application and understanding was that animation needed bones and rigging. And so for my fan blades and telephone I added 2 or 3 bones to simulate an anchor point, and the moving bone. This worked out swimmingly, as keyframe bones were easy and I could even deform that of the telephone line lightly as the phone rang. However this was also wholly unnecessary as weight painting, bones and more are only good for deforming meshes and I want to create around 7 for my typewriter. 

These bones however had to be unique and couldn't work off of one single root bone (foreshadowing incoming) since a root bone would limit the upwards and downwards motion. So I rigged them and animated my typewriter according to 3 different anchors. I thought the animation worked well and as I split it into different bones it should be easy to gather and import into the engine. How wrong I was. Unreal Engine refuses to use rigs and animation sets off of multiple anchors/root bones. So I was left with either scrapping my animation, rig and work altogether to manually animate the changes of the keys/paper scraping. Or go through the maddening process of exporting the typewriter into 3 key meshes, the moving keys, backwards moving cylinder/paper and the unmoving body. 

Then assemble this mesh on the same point in a blueprint as to keep them together and maintain correlation in syncing the animations on the same point in time. I went for the latter, primarily out of stubbornness and also not wanting to lose my work with reanimating the assets as the rig worked well. Performance wise I am wholly unsure if splitting it into so many meshes but combining in blueprinting has a terrible impact on culling/draw calls. But I am certain that I have learnt my lesson when rigging static objects.

VFX - Smoke and Dust)

I had a lot of fun repolishing a smoke VFX I had been working on and including in a lot of my projects. The plumes unfortunately suffered some visual errors as the materials were not only emissive in a strange manner but opacity had been set incorrectly. As such the lighting would, regardless of set particle colour, apply a dark mask of black. Rendering the smoke invisible. After fixing this matter I went on to add a little bit of dust particles to the scene. Fortunately I was able to repurpose a firefly cascade shader to do exactly this. However needed to really finetune the values to once again no longer be emissive, move way more erratically and drastically fade out of view. What was a simple task, unfortunately yielded some problems as I initially wanted the particles of dust to rotate but could not find a means to tile thai appropriately to another point, such making the centre the pivot. Meaning the plane would spin but visually not change as it's a sphere. I ended up culling this idea altogether and went on to fine tune the amount spawning in the scene. Unfortunately and much like real dust there is always way more in the scene than what is seen through the camera. However with lifetime expectancy set low I didn't experience any major effects of frame rate and can happily showcase the full diorama still capping at 70-80~ fps with all animations, VFX and mid poly meshes considered. 

Weekly Evaluation and Fixes)

This week was a big one, as not only was I having to import my fina meshes, textures and more. But setting up a large array of decals, VFX and animation to boot added a lot of stress to my workload. However I also made a lot of mistakes which taught me a ton of working with this wide array of assets. The main takeaway being is, consider how meshes are utilised and if animation is a core piece of the process. A lot of my cutaway optimizations such as the inner of the typewriter rendered some animations fairly risky. As my inexperience with the technology made me model it without cutting further in which would definitely been necessary as the backside moves in. Luckily the lighting removes seeing any missing texture and the animation also quickly manoeuvres back to position. However, if I had spent more time on the research rather than assumption from watching a few clips of Columbo, I knew I could have been truer to life. Additionally my blockout stage in comparison is highly saturated and values are all over the place. I uncovered a key piece of composition and value control in this project, greyscale LUTS and cinematic viewports. By using grayscale LUTSI destaurated all of my scene and was able to make elements of disinterest darker, moving that of importance/highlight to eb lighter. I could then also desaturate my base colours by a small percentile as that is an issue I struggle with now looking back on all my projects. Furthermore the cinematic viewport allows the viewing of the scene with a 3,3 grid. Having been reminded and taught of the rule of thirds but with no way of easily applying said tools without overlay in photoshop, I ended up scrapping half of my camera setup in greyboxing for better angles. Next week I can't wait to get out my renders, and talk more upon the subject.

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 2 ) Captains Table Environment - Texturing in UE4 Setup and Export (Week 8) (21/11/2022)

3DSMax Making Messy Piles)

After all my texturing was done I went on to making more diverse meshes through my modular kit. The primary meshes are messy piles. By combining assets together into larger scale messy piles I could eliminate large amounts of draw calls by individually placing the modular kits in scene plus the nuisance of moving said large piles about. Fortunately 3DSMax has a modifier called MassFxRigidbody that gives simulation rigid body collision to any mesh and lets it be affected by material properties. Whilst I didn’t need pure realism in simulation nor its animation keyframes I went on to copy a lot of my books, arch binders and general purpose folders before dropping them from a notable distance of a few feet down. After falling I had to collapse the modifier and delete the keyframe to ensure none of the falling animation was remaining in the baked final pose. I repeated this pipeline a few times due to the fickle nature of 3DSMax and crashing since simulation both animation and collision can get very intensive (even on very low poly meshes). However my work was not done since a lot of overlap still remained and I realised some of the books/folders had even poked under the floor plane. As such I manually adjusted each mesh before assembling them on point 0,0 for export.

3DSMax Setup for Export)

The wrap up export for 3DSMax came luckily without issues. All that had to be done was to reset the transform and pivot points on my meshes, centralise them on point 0,0 and remove unnecessary data with deleting X Form. Whilst on point 0,0 I did move a few meshes up since they were clipping below the floor plane and would appear through the ground in the scene if I did so, while also rotating wall paintings/meshes accordingly. Another core step was setting up my sub object materials, since some more complex meshes like the corkboard or the telephone needed to be split into 2 for engine work or simply contained multiple texture sheets to spruce up the mesh. I did this with the slate material editor in 3DSMax and assigned varying material id values of 1 and 2 to my meshes.

UE4 Setup and Lighting)

After aligning everything to point 0, I went to export. Following import I realised that a lot of my assets were quite small in comparison to the in scene grey boxed versions. Through some troubleshooting I realised this was due to my import settings lacking a crucial detail, scale value. All my grey boxed assets are scaled up by 9 so I began to import my finalised assets in through this method as well. By having poor scaling it would greatly affect my lighting bakes since the meshes are too small/too big for my lighting setup to get to grips with it. Following this I made a few new folders to organise materials, textures and my static meshes. Fortunately all my imports went through smoothly and my textures showed up well following some minor tweaking by disabling sRGB on my linearly channel packed maps. 

Peer Feedback)

Following setup I got some helpful advice and feedback from peers on how to push my scene further. The first was to add more variety in the form of decals to both the carpet and walls. Since the office is rather dirty and unkempt decals would help breakup the tiling of texture. The secondary was to add more chip and wear onto my chair's leather and tone down the roughness values to make it less shiny. Considering how well used it would be with Columbos hounding investigations over the years it would have taken quite the beating from late night investigating. The final was to generally add more damage to other assets such as folds/yellowish paper to my files/folders and desaturate the scene since it felt very orange and possibly hang up a light fixture.

Full Title: Game 3001 Professional Brief 2 ) Captains Table Environment - Texturing in Substance Designer (Week 7) (14/11/2022)

Designer -  Wall Plaster/Paint)

For wall plaster I wanted to ensure that the general material is capable of vertex painting, but is not too noisy. After some research into reference I uncovered that apart from surface bumps and cracks generally the material ends up being fairly rough but not too colourful. This ensures that the walls don't take away from the main centrepieces of my desk and that I could add decals in the scene over this relatively low detail wall tileable.

The tiling is also a feature I wanted to ensure doesn’t become too obvious due to the fact it's taking up all of the wall as one material. Which is another reason to incorporate vertex painting. I think the simplicity paid off however I might tweak it further in the engine due to how the roughness is displayed. 

Designer -  Carpet)

Unlike the paint/plaster the carpet was a material I wanted to have high noise detail. Since the scale would be so zoomed out and tiling, the carpet fuzziness is one key aspect I wanted to highlight in the material. I feel it came out relatively well as I utilised a multitude of twistable and warp nodes to pull the wave further like a thread. 

But also in colour sits upon a relatively tileable carpet. The values are also picked out from reference images of typical grunge grey/dark purple office carpets that have little changed over the 80 years of office environment. And most likely would have also cropped up in the home considering the 80s alternate aesthetic and material mixing. 

Alpha - Background Photo)

Similarly to my fruit cart I wanted to incorporate a window. However, unlike my fruit cart, this window is facing inwards from the interior point of view. As such I would luckily be able to get away with less detail considering the further out this element will be. But still took a similar approach as to generating maps, in regards to using Photoshop. Despite my intensive library of random research images and references I have yet to visit Los Angeles or run across any streets that may incorporate this building aesthetic. So I took to the public domain to source some photographs that would fit the appropriate angle and structure but ran once again into another problem. The photos were primarily daytime and my office window looked out into the night of Los Angeles. With hue, curve and exposure adjustment layers I managed to change and overlay false stars into the image giving the illusion of said nighttime. I also added a car, a Peugeot 403 of the era reminiscent of Columbos' broken vehicle.

Designer  - Window TRIM Sheet)

Moving onto incorporating this into my TRIM, I learnt from my previous mistakes of node graph management and blended all textures as the final step. I didn't want the normals to be too intensive as well as the ambient occlusion since the trim would be used primarily for the window image, but also with the ceiling/side room wooden liners. So I turned down the colour values intensely and reversed the roughness to ensure that the car would showcase as the shiniest element through the window. This trim pack also showcases another packed map of emissions from the stars and blaring street lamps. By being a separate lamp/alpha I can definitely open up more options of manipulating the material in the engine and possibly animating it in the process.

Weekly Evaluation)

Conclusively I’m quite pleased with how the week is going, unfortunately I haven’t had time yet to test the values of my textures in the engine and so I know I will have a lot of tweaking/modifying as next week goes on. However I am also closely approaching my formative deadline and will most likely have to carefully plan out elements to look into animation wise with blueprinting. Looking at my meshes there is a lot to work with my typewriter however not so much for other elements and so will most likely have to pull from VFX to accumulate more detail/atmosphere. Another concern I have is performance since the primary hero asset is sitting at a lot more tris than I initially realised and may have to be put back into modelling to try to cut down further.