In this blog post I am going to evaluate my modular pack, I am going to break it down into three sections which are: What went well, What didn't go well and issues/changes along the way.
What went well in Unit 9 Task1: Task one went extremely well for me, I had an idea of doing a horror survival in an asylum and I knew there was a banded asylum not far from me so this helped me with inspiration of how to conceptualize my ideas, blueprints and creating basic 3D models of my concepts. It also gave me an insight of how urban explorers feel when going to these places and how airy and creepy the atmosphere is. Task2: advancing my basic models in Maya went well, I made sure all the models I made had UV's and light maps, over half of them I gave custom collision boxes and they all had diffuse maps and normals applied to them in unreal with some tested in Maya. Adding all the texture maps made me look into advanced techniques and different types of texture maps like ambient occlusion and emissive light maps which kept me pushing to try new things inside Maya which I have not done before. Task3: task 3 was a quick process as I had all my models ready and textured and just needed to present my models in an overview and into categories which was quite quick and then finally making a small demo level of what could be done with the modular pack to show it works and how to use it. I got minimal errors when compiled in unreal, which were easy fixes like overlapping light maps. Conclusion: Overall, I think the modular pack went extremely well, I ended up having 69 assets for my modular pack which was over triple the mount required in the criteria and I possible could of had more if I had a little more time. I am extremely pleased with how both my stair cases turned out after modelling and texturing. Even though building this staircase gave me many headaches of how to problem solve UVing for such a big asset which resulted in breaking down the stairs into pieces that would connect back together in the engine, this gave me more UV space and a better texture quality overall. I applied collision boxes to over half my assets and making sure they were numbered correctly and an enough space left between each collision box I didn't run into any problems with these. The light maps also went extremely well, out of the 69 models I created, when I ran the build feature in unreal engine I only got two light map issues which both were under 2% and was easily fixed What didn't go so well in unit 9 Task1: Even now I thought task 1 went well, I spent a lot of time trying to block out a level in unreal engine of the layout I wanted for my asylum. Looking back on this now I feel it was a waste of valuable time that I could of spent making the modular pack asset better. Task2: I found the technical side of the task a little challenging even though I know how to apply the techniques I learned to my 3D models. I found trying to write, why I need to do this and how it works quite challenging. In the end, I did more research on the areas I struggled to write about and broke it down so I found it easier to understand. Task3: setting up materials and applying to the 3D models was a little time consuming other than that there wasnt any serious issues to sort out just minor geomatry fixes and texture fixes when i had a closer look at my models in unreal. Conclusion: The final end product for some of the windows and the medical door. The glass in the windows of the smaller ones came out dark, repetitive due to UV overlapping, and not unique glass planes. In my original brainstorm I wanted each window plane to be broken/dirty or have its own unique appearance. As I wanted to save on UV space to have a better texture resolution I overlapped the window plane UV which resulted in the planes having the same texture, the solution I came up with was just to use a very strong transparent glass material in unreal engine that didn't have any cracks or dirt on. For the medical door the model was how I wanted the door to look like, but once I textured it, it didn't look like what I had hoped it to look like, I wanted it to be a metal door that after years of neglect the paint was flaking off. Instead, it looks like the door had clouds painted onto it and gives the wrong appearance for what I am trying to achieve for my modular pack. Issues and changes I had along the way in unit 9 The wall gave me a numerous issue along the way which I problem solved and changed. The biggest change I did on my walls was in my brainstorms I had fully tiled walls and half walls, which were half tiled and plastered and planned on the player being able to knock off the tiles from the wall. When it came to modelling these walls, getting the measurements exactly the same, so each wall would interlock and be no seam, making sure every other row started/finished on a half tile so each row was offset different. In the modelling process each wall ended up high poly, the walls had to many N-gons, and to fix this would of pushed the poly count up higher. My solution was to scrap all these walls and build fresh models that were low poly, take them into substance painter and apply a texture that did the same effect as my original models and increase the height/normal maps on the tiles so it gave the illusion they had more depth to them. Not only does it improve performance for the user it also look more visually better and less problematic. Although this did create it own problem, if they UV didn't line up with each other the textures would appear out of align on the seams and ruined the effect. I had to spend some time aligning the UV up on each wall with the grid display on and made sure each wall started in the same place. effect. I had to spend some time aligning the UV up on each wall with the grid display on and made sure each wall started in the same place. I also had to use this technique with the floors and ceilings so that there wasn't a seam had the floors ran as a conscious patten. Other issues I had was when importing models into unreal engine I would get the following error 'object has degenerated tangent bases' which would make me go back to the model and look for any problems on the mesh. using 'cleanup' in Maya helped me find some of the errors, a usually random vertex that I forget to delete or hidden faces from a bad extrude. Most of the time cleanup didn't find any errors and it was basically down to overlapping UV or missing out a face when UVing and was easily fixed.
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December 2016
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