DMUGA Week 17 - Texturing the level + BMW Interview

As the project continues, we finally get round to texturing the majority of the assets; making sure all of the models are done correctly, I'm in a rush to get everything together for Thursday's interview, and there's just so much more to do!

First things first, I found out on the previous Friday that I was selected for the BMW interview, so, over the weekend/ Monday evening I was adjusting my CV and beginning to create my cover letter in preparation for Thursday.

There was a lot of problems on Monday with the lighting that we tried to fix. The issue has been there since the start, but I thought it would have been solved after we did the lightmaps for the containers. This wasn't the case, so we had to sprawl through the internet to try and find anything we could that affected how the lighting reacted in the scene. A few settings were tweaked and it looked ever so slightly better, but it was still apparent!
Just for reference, this is what I'm talking about:

Light bleed still there... Trying to find a way to cover it up in most places.

In short, 80% of Monday was just trying to solve the issue, or come up with ideas on how we could hide it. At first, I felt like I had wasted a days worth of work, but on a personal level, I found out some new things, and did come up with a way we could just hide a lot of it from the player.
The last 20% was on making a couple of assets, and trying to get some sound effects in to make it a bit more immersive.

After this week's life drawing, I had a realisation about my work in that I don't let it flow as much as I would like it too. Also, I'm not going out of my comfort zone to improve as much as I'd like either - Things have got to change. What I need to do:
-Try different media
-Try a different approach e.g. focus on one area instead of the entire body to create a better composition.
-Relax more, take a structured view i.e. plan the key points first so it doesn't look distorted.

In the afternoon, there was another issue that needed to be solved... The frame rate as you are walking through the starting area drops dramatically because of the particle emitters. There were too many particles at once, so I got a tip on how to create LOD's for them, plus, reduced the lifetime of them so that it wasn't spawning and hanging around for longer than it really needed.

Add LOD

Duplicate the settings you want to change from the higher LOD

Change LOD Settings + Emitter Settings to what you want

There was panic in trying to get some images online for my portfolio that I had to get ready for Thursday's interview, I would give you a link... But it's definitely not something I would want to be of much consideration in the current state it's in. Not to mention, I hadn't even got anything smart to wear as I assumed I remembered to bring up some smart clothes - not the case at all! I had a tie and a black shirt, but no shoes or trousers... Off to ASDA at 9 o' clock on Wednesday evening!

I also spent some time creating some seamless textures so we can use them over and over if possible:

-Concrete
-Burlap
-Tarpaulin
-Sand_003
-Rock

By Wednesday evening, I had my CV, cover letter, Portfolio and blog link e-mailed, so all I had to do was go to the library to print them off and prepare.
Work-wise, Wednesday was a good day as we got some more texturing done, the majority of the assets were coming together as each person is doing their portion of unwrapping & texturing.

After waking up on Thursday morning, it became more and more daunting the closer it got to my interview time at 11:30. We had a Q & A session on internships until 10 o' clock, so I thought I could get some work done before I went in, but I was so nervous that I couldn't focus. In short, I ended up going in at around 12:30, and not getting much done at all.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to the last 2, but I enjoyed the experience of being in that kind of situation as I hadn't been before, not to mention I actually was forced to tune-up my CV as it wasn't very good before, AND, I wrote my first cover letter. So, I know it sounds bad I haven't learnt all this already, I know now how to go about this kind of process and what to expect. Win/Win!

In terms of the project, the whole morning was on the interview, so I only really had the afternoon/evening to do anything worth-while. I did add in some more sound effects, change the lighting slightly so it's a bit more natural, and finished unwrapping/lightmapping the rest of my assets ready for Friday, as we agreed to get everything together and imported into Unreal Engine 4, so we can start populating it.

Friday was a little bit hectic in terms of managing everyone's files and putting them all together into one because we didn't want their to be any problems, but it turned out some models had problems so we couldn't export, the file re-naming & re-importing was procedural but still required us not to over-write any of our previous work etc. To summerise... I had a big headache by the end of the day, but everything was re-imported into the engine successfully, so now we can just focus on finishing the textures, populating, and re-fining the level in more detail.

Here's this week's run-through of the level so far: