Mark Eastland's DMUGA Blog: DMUGA Week 21 - Does thou stress continue? Is it 'This way, or that way?'

The short answer to the question above is yes, yes it does!

Monday wasn't too bad, but I still didn't get what I wanted to get done, done. I played about with the foliage in trying to get the wind effects to look good as well as the material and it was a little bit better, just still not quite how I imagined it to be.
Part of my 'unproductive' day was due to a lot of problems with the unwrapping of the dead tree. Now, I know this sounds ridiculous, but it genuinely didn't want to relax in the UV editor, so I had to try the longer ways of unwrapping but nothing seemed to work.I got it partially done before handing it to a team-mate to have a go. Anya managed to get it done with a lot of seams in it, but by this point we just went with it because it was eating up too much time.

Tree Bark Unwrap

I started looking at inspiration for the big fountain in the middle of the gardens and I found a few I liked. In the end (Tuesday afternoon) I decided to go with this one as my reference:

Large fountain reference

I also got half of my fungi textured - not to the standard I would have liked but it's not too bad:

We didn't have a model for life drawing on Tuesday, so we did something a bit different with a 'washing-line' type set up. I have to admit that it's good that we did very fast 2minute sketches to try and get everything in, but with something like this I'd feel bad about looking at what I've done in 1-2mins. Here's the drawings for today:

Crossing from the morning to the afternoon, I got the base mesh for the fountain done and put it into the engine that evening to see how well it would fit. We thought it'd look nice in white marble, so I textured it using a 512x512 Albedo, normal & roughness map an this is how it turned out:

Large Fountain

Small Fountain

I finished off the rest of my tree-fungi, and refined the tree unwrap some more so it was definitely out of the way.

We had an open day Wednesday with our previous 'Container City' project on display and people could come round and ask us about the course.
The fountain was refined some more because initially, it was a 'base mesh' which was exported as a whole, however, we saved 6000-7000 tris by exported the components separately and building the mesh in UE4. I made the collision for it so that Dom could work on the fountain jumping puzzle correctly. He also managed to get the our two worlds connected using the rabbit hole and it just makes me want to learn how to code even more!
Here's the sequence:

Eat the cake

Shrink

Go down the rabbit hole

Viola!

Here's a cute little lilypad I quickly made just to get on in there:

Our meeting on Thursday was a very productive one! We finally have a team name!... 'This way, That way' is what we go by now, and we can finally put our minds at ease about it.
In terms of the project, we made a few changes to the landscape, Sharn made an official style-guide that we can all use, a scripted assets list (by the amazing Dom), and we generally got stuff done!

I put in some sounds & finalised collision for the fountain (Although, it's not done, it is good enough to play through the puzzle completely), unwrapped all of my mushrooms, the material for the hedges was made and tweaked in the engine, I re-imported a lot of updated assets/textures, made a gravel texture, and changed the landscape to relatively flat plains (What were we thinking before?!):

I textured my 4 mushrooms on Friday, re-placed the tree-bark texture, made a 1 minute looping audio track for the mad hatters tea party (Sourced from Freesoung.org using a creative commons 0 Licence), and fixed some problems with the hedges.