DMUGA Week 4 - Presenting our film scene/'Post-mortem' :)

The final deadline approaches for our 2nd group project, and I have to admit I'm a little nervous, but excited to see the scene come together to produce the fruits of our labour. I'm sure that we'll get it done on time, I just know that it'll be very tight considering we have a lot of write up to do as well as putting the scene together all within a few days. Ahhh! It'll be ok, heads down and across the line :)

Monday was a really fun and successful day! We (our group) learnt a few tricks from Steve, and we managed to just about get everything into one scene ready to be arranged and materials applied by 8 o' clock in the evening. I actually forgot to make the tiling floor texture alongside the others (I knew there was something I didn't do!) So I made it that very evening for the sake of the deadline we had today to get everything done. It's al-right and I think it'll fit the scene so I'm happy with how it turned out considering I'm totally knackered.

 Considering I made it is just over an hour, it ended up being pretty good!

The rest of the texture sheets are here:

Visual Design on Tuesday was another feedback session with Chris which wasn't as helpful as we wanted it to be because our scene didn't load... Not a big problem though. It was also good to see the work the other groups were getting up to and their almost final scene completed. I'd say at this point I was pleased with what we'd done, we just have to get the lighting & camera angle down and we are all dandy.

Life drawing was surprising because we did have a model in the end, and my drawings weren't too bad. I just wish that I would have drawn mine a little bit bigger and rendered the fabric a bit better. I think I need to make use of the tonal values more as I used the same dark value on the model as I did on the background:

During the self-directed session, we worked a little bit more on the film scene and we managed to get some more textures applied and in the Engine working great. The scene with the assets were pretty much all in there and placed correctly, we just had a couple more to place.
Mikes session in the afternoon was awesome as always! He gave us an introduction into the Sentry Gun project we'll be doing the following week and provided some idea generation techniques - pretty much random from a selection of words to give a brief to meet, and splicing which involves taking two objects and merging them together to create the shape of whatever it is you're aiming for.
For example, I'll take a futuristic sentry gun and merge it with a banana. Now I have a banana shaped sentry gun which fires banana skins everywhere, making characters 'fall' over!

That evening, we stayed in the labs and had everything in engine and tried to sort out the lighting & camera of the scene.

It was very tricky to try and get right, but Lucy & Amanda had a good go at getting the lighting to look similar. They seem to have solved a few problems with dark textures by literally "banging a light in there". It's not the best tactic, but if it gets us one step closer to getting the scene looking right then by all means bang a light in there.

There was a lot of issues with the light-maps, causing random shadows everywhere, but we managed to get 95% of them sorted, so only a couple remain. However, those that remain weren't as important as the issue with the stairs. Here's the resolved light-map for the stairs:

Some other lighting problems which weren't desperate to be fixed for the final scene - the bottom of the walls are red, but couldn't be lowered in the density because the walls were all one object. Therefore, if we lowered the density further, the upper walls would look odd too:

Wednesday so was stressful, and it was another long day in the labs until 9 O' clock! I barely ate the whole day and ended up snacking on some biscuits (which by the way I never do!), but I needed the energy to last me until the labs closed. We spent the whole day trying to put the final things together/final touches on the scene as well as switching between all 5 of us to get the presentation ready for the morning.
The presentation was saved/uploaded at 20:55, 5 minutes before we had to leave... That's certainly not a healthy thing to do. I really do think now that we should have allocated a lot more time to getting the assets in the Engine and sorting all of the problems out, way before the final deadline. Plus, dedicating a decent amount of time on the presentation because a structured, well organised presentation is almost just as important as the work you're showing.

Here's some beauty shots of the final scene:

There was a little mix-up with what documents had to be submitted by Thursday, so I was stressing out over producing everything as well as all of the written design documents/review forms and there was no way that was going to happen for Wednesday night. Fortunately, these don't have to be done until Monday so I was very relieved about that.

On comes presentation day and everyone's work looked so good, so accurate, and well presented! I am amazed at how good everything looks already and we're just at the start of year 2! I was a little nervous purely because the style of presentation (20 seconds per slide, 20 slides) is a good style to have, but it throws me off a lot because I keep forgetting what it is I want to say. I ended up not saying a bunch of really important things which are key to how the group worked well, and how we went about the workflow to ensure that everyone is working from the same template.
It was ok I have to admit, I feel that I could have said so much more which would have been very relevant to how we worked as a team, but we can't go back and change it.

Here's the assets that I made/textured for the project:

I loved this group project though! I think that working in a team is really good fun, you can learn a lot, everything keeps you excited, you can help other people progress, and you all share a common goal to which is to make some that is awesome! It'll be weird going back to doing a single project next week for the 'Sentry Gun'.

Final Comparison:

Post-Mortem:

Summary of the project/What I’ve learnt:

As a very quick summary, I thoroughly enjoyed working in a team to produce this film scene. It held some challenges in the organisational sense, but I have learnt a lot from this experience. Each time I work in a team it will be a little bit different, but at least I know a bit on how to go about it. I like how the scene turned out because the models and textures look professional. However, I do feel that I didn't prioritise the room proportions as much as I should have. Overall, the project was very good, the end product could have been better (as always), but I am proud of what we managed to make, and glad that we chose this scene due to the challenges we had to confront during the process.

What I would do differently:

There's a few things I would do differently but time organisation, work distribution, and priorities are the main ones.

Time organisation: I think we would have benefitted from shifting everything backward in our plan and allocation more time to working in the Game Engine, and constantly checking back to the original scene to see if everything we do, fits the scene almost exactly. It would have been good if we had a lot more time at the end to tweak, learn about cameras in-game, get the lighting right, and work on the presentation much better than what we did. In addition, to have done a model-to-scene comparison check before the texturing stage to ensure that if anything looks wrong afterwards, it can only be the texturing, lighting, or camera (make sure the base mesh is accurate as possible).

Priorities: I didn't actually realise until part-way through the modelling to texturing stage that we had allocated things which weren't in the actual scene. In the back of my mind I was seeing it as a "Stretch goal" to expand on the scene and make the actual set, but this possibly detracted from potentially getting a better end result by having more people work on the important things in the scene itself.

Work Distribution: I think the distribution was okay, but it was apparent that some people had more to do than others. I think this unintentionally happened as we were discussing who wanted to do what in the scene. Next time, it would be good to establish how long we think each asset will take to make and double check with everyone that we are all sure that we can handle the work given to us - Constantly ask throughout If anyone feels they have too much or won't finish on-time/feel they have too little and are taking it easy, so that we can distribute the load more evenly.

Ways to improve personally:

-Learn more about lightmaps and how to make them correctly/avoid errors in engine.

-Spend additional time on the 2D aspect.

-Look at different kinds of materials in real life and how to replicate them as closely as possible in the game engine.

-Stick to the initial deadlines set within the project to make sure we’re all on track and using our time as efficiently as we can.

All is done now, I just had to write up the design documents over the weekend and prepare my mind for the creativity side of the 'Sentry Gun' next week.