DMUGA Week 18 - "Propulation", finishing touches, and beauty shots! (+Project Post-Mortem)

 Well, well, well... Here's the final deadline for the "Container City" project, and I must say it has been great to work with Luke, Georgia & Andy on this. I was getting very stressed towards the end, but it evened out and we got the job done, and done well. Read on for the breakdown of this week's work.

It was time to get down and dirty with populating the first section some more as it was still lacking some clutter, and other things just to bring it to life a bit more. I also plugged in my texture sheets that I did on Sunday night and played around with the audio a bit more to iron out some of the irregularities.

Weapons In-game 512x512

Crowbar, baseball nail-bat, hammer-saw, fire axe, knuckle duster knife, shovel, and cricket bat

Life drawing was interesting this week as there wasn't a model, so since we already brought in some props, we took turns the entire session posing (clothes on of course!) for a 1minute pose and a 5 minute pose. The props made the poses instantly appear more dynamic and have more character in them than usual. Unfortunately, yet again I didn't get to change up my media as my fineliner ran out straight away! That's now on my list of "things to get",

Tuesday afternoon was mainly based around populating some more to get a better idea, and organising most of our imported meshes and textures. Here's some pictures of what it looked like by the evening:

As you can see, there was still so much to do population-wise, hence why I didn't take any screenshots of the final area just yet apart from the bar because it was just such an empty space.

Wednesday was yet again, more populating, unfortunately, I haven't got any screenshots from Wednesday's progress, but I know that it involved A LOT of importing, re-organising, fixing, and a little bit of planning for what needs to be done and by what time so that we can definitively finish on-time by Friday. There is this screenshot of the entrance to the final area however:

I also got my windmills to finally turn, and added in a quick 'fade-in' matinee so when the level loads, it fades into it from a black screen - A very simple thing to do:

Windmill Rotation Blueprint

Tesla Dev - Fade Into level (From black) UE4

I took a break on Thursday from populating in the evening as Andy was more than up for the job that night - Throughout the project I have asked the group's opinion on where to place things and what they think will look good, but by this point I think I was getting too bogged down with it and afraid to ruin what we've already done. Therefore, it was very good to get a fresh mind on the scenario, and make it twice as better for the finishing touches.

The ending blueprint which triggers when the play enters the volume:

Fade out, play sound effects and quit the level blueprint

How to spawn a particle emitter at a location in the world

If you want to then destroy it after a certain amount of time, add a "delay", then a "DestroyActor"; remembering to reference again, and that's it!

Even though I took a break from populating, I had a generally calm night by re-unwrapping 4 assets & do 2 texture sheets accordingly. I say it was four technically, but I'd count it as two... The switch box, switch lever, battery 1 & 2:

Battery 1 & 2

Switch_Lever

Switch_Box

Battery UVW Unwrap

Switch box & lever UVW Unwrap

All of Friday was very hectic for us all as there were a lot of things that needed to be done, fixed, re-organised and added to the level & our documents. Everything was re-named & re-sized, every asset was documented on who modelled, unwrapped & textured them, there were assets being made on the spot and imported straight in etc. In conclusion, it was a fast, productive day where we all pulled together to finalise our files ready for submission. We were doing high res screenshots at the last minute and putting all of our things into the submission folder.

So, that's it! Well, we still had Saturday afternoon to put together the presentation... Which was hilariously fun!

Here's some screenshots of the final product:

Post-Mortem:

Short summary of the project: I thoroughly enjoyed this project not only because of the process of making a lot of modular assets fast & some kind of level design, but because the final product is something which I am very proud to present and that I can truly say is good. I'm not saying my previous work isn't very good, but I'm always harsh on myself and I don't see much of what I make is to a professional standard. This however has raised the standard of work by a long way because at a glance, it looks like an actual game level - that to me is amazing to think that with 4 people in 4 weeks, can make a fully functional section of a game level that looks professional.

In short, I think we as a team worked extremely well together to make an aesthetically good looking product which successfully met the brief.

What we wanted to include (Stretch goals):

-Footstep sounds

-Cut-scene

-Skeletal meshes & some kind of animation

-Clothe lines with clothes blowing in the wind

-More decals

Things to improve for future group projects/What I'd do differently:

-Even though we did plan very well, it was a spoken one, not a written one, Therefore, I think we would benefit from a solid, concrete plan which clearly states what must be done and by what time.

-Organisation of files was very good, however, in order to make it less stressful I would like to think that we could just update our main file twice per day, once in the morning and once before we leave.

-Create a file naming convention which we must all abide by before it can go into the main folder, plus, making sure all PSD files have appropriately named layers in every single PSD.

-Be less precious about populating and go with speed - I spent a long time placing things in the right place which IS GOOD, but when it comes to 'clutter', just put it everywhere but keeping it logical so it makes sense. This would have saved possible half a day to a full day of possible other work if I did this.