DMUGA Week 22 - Slow progress... Just chugging along :)

I was off to a flying start this week when I accidentally deleted a whole days worth of work! I re-did most of it during the evening on Monday, and it actually benefited me as re-doing the base for my tree yielded better results.

I worked on the fountain a bit more/sorted the collision meshes:

Made the column for the fountain puzzle:

Made the bird bath & two stone textures over the weekend:

Attempted to make the hedge material look less tiled:

After Monday's mishap with my over-saving of my work, I did pretty well to do 2 day's worth of work in one.

On Tuesday I finished tree branches, attached them together, and begun making the branches:

This took far longer than I expected it to, and I felt guilty for not feeling like I did a lot. It paid out in the end though as it ended up looking al-right.

On Wednesday, I spent a long time trying to see what Epic did with one of their materials as it appeared tessellated but was only using parallax displacement to fake the geometry. This would be a really good technique to learn because it could be so helpful in the future to get more realistic results without compromising much memory.

Here's what Epic's material looked like at a glance:

Example Content Stone Material - Parallax Mapping/Bump Offset

If anyone understands this, please explain it to me! :)

I finished the tree off by making the high poly branches and baking them to the texture:

Thursday was a good day as I managed  to get the Myosotis (forget me not) flowers done and they turned out very nice:

I made the door for the tree by making the high poly version and baking it onto the low poly:

High poly on the left, low poly on the right

I made an attempt at the rope texture, but I couldn't get the lines to match up properly so I left it for the moment and started on the swing - It wasn't long before I realised that even that was a bit of a challenge. I want to make the rope swing in the game engine which would require me to rig it with bones (I've never rigged/animated rope before!).
As usual I looked into more blueprinting from Dom, and watched some Tesla Dev tutorials on Youtube:

Tesla Dev - Youtube

Friday was a good day for getting things together as we got round to importing the fountain puzzle and it works perfectly!

We re-imported a lot of tweaked textures/meshes, and put in the large ornamental gate:

I also quickly re-arranged the Philadelphus bush because my first attempt wasn't that good at all:

Original on the left, re-arranged version on the right

We have the material of some of our flowers set up to make any coloured flower we want to:

And finally, Dom was looking into improving the water shader and it was much better than what we had, but I can't post a screenshot of it at the moment as it wasn't compatible with the 4.7 version, so we'll transfer it over on Monday.

I really hope next week goes well as I feel as though I'm falling behind and not getting what I want to get done, done.