DMUGA Week 23 - Lookin' good! :)

Monday was a productive day as I finished off my flowers I started at the weekend, & mapped out the boundaries for the non-playable area:

It was really bugging me that I attempted the rope texture at the weekend and I couldn't manage to get it to all match up perfectly to make it tile, so with a simple bit of advice from Anya... it wasn't hard at all, plus, I thought I'd just try and keep it simple and not overcomplicate it... It's a piece of rope!

Here's how I made my extremely basic rope texture in 4 easy steps using pretty much just the filters in Photoshop:

Simple!

I quickly made a stalk for the lily-pads because Anya's idea what that it would give the underwater part a more 'surreal' appearance... Which it does!

I began an ornate archway for the entrance to the secondary gardens, then called it a day.

Life drawing this week was good again because we did the movement poses for 20-30 seconds each, and I really think it helps my speed because as I've said numerous time before, it is one of my weaknesses.

It's hard to see because my screenshots were all taken at the end of this week after the changes were made, but if you look back to the previous blog posts, you'll see the lighting has changed a fair amount and it now has a much more natural but enhanced look in my opinion. I fiddled around it with to get it a bit less harsh on the eyes, and Dom/Anya got rid of the auto exposure which was becoming more and more annoying for us to work with.

Potions, Cakes & Food!:

Finished off the archway:

I re-arranged all of the hedges to fit more perfectly together and be more symmetrical, but in the end, we ended up just making 4 separate long hedges to get rid of the constant break in the hedges:

Dom & I (Pretty much all Dom), attempted the bump offset material I mentioned in the previous post, and you could see it was trying to work, but I think we needed a much more refined mask as it was made in a couple of minutes just to test the method to see if it worked:

I did a bit more work on the swing by making a quick texture for it to see if it worked or not, and finally made it look like it was broken + I had Dom to the rescue again when I was frustrated by the concept of modelling a knot... It's much more basic than I thought and I was just being a 'wuss'. Anyway, here's the swing in the level:

I realised the tree now looks ridiculously out of place with the weird roots coming out of it, so I started to play about with the bottom and see if I could make it look less weird.

I started making the butterfly texture and I finished it on Thursday. Butterflies are a must... And I must say they are a very nice touch to our level which is only possible due to the scripting of Dom, We haven't yet put it in our level, but it is tested and working nicely - Here's the texture sheet:

I started making the archway to go within the arch of the hedge archways to act as support for them, and break up the greenery a little.

We finally have a very good water that we are all proud of! Woohoo! I didn't like it at first because I loved the abnormally cyan coloured water we already had, but this one grew on me but there was one thing missing... Refraction! By just adding a couple of nodes in the material editor, we finally got a water that looks good from the top as well as the bottom:

Top:

Underwater:

I Finished butterfly based off of the common blue butterfly on Thursday:

3DS Max Render

UK Butterflies

Obviously it is changed a little bit because I thought it would stand out more in our level with the black outline (I may change it back though), but the majority of the butterfly's design is there:

I had so many problems when it came to finishing the VERY basic job of making the archway for the hedges purely because of a bug in unreal engine which does not like this particular arch shape whatsoever...

Not only does this error come up, ALL of the UV's are reset I.e. if you unwrapped it, it is no longer unwrapped...

This took up a lot of my time and I ended up just leaving it and asking Steve & Craig (3D tutors) for advice, and just gave it to them to see if they could find a fix. Therefore, I feel like I wasted my day.

Friday was a nice and relaxed day as I was just making the maze to go in the flowerbed, texturing one playing card with the ace of hearts (I want to have the King, Queen & Jack), and making the bridge fit into place with our level so that now it is a nice fit!

So, overall it was a good week, I'm excited to move and and get so much more done the next week because I feel as if we're just running a bit behind at the moment, but hopefully it'll come together! :)