DMUGA Week 24 - UE4 Problems & fixes + Degenerate tangent base issue

I know we have technically got a fair amount of time left on this project... But is it enough to do what we want to? There are so many things yet to be done, and Easter break is fast approaching. I plan to only do 1-1.5 weeks worth of work over Easter and take half of it off, so I can do a little bit but not much; not to mention the extended writing task which will also need to be completed.

Monday wasn't the most pleasurable of days as our frame rate has significantly dropped to only 13 FPS! This is not on and we seriously need to ask for help on optimizing our level.
I had a look into LOD's today and it turns out, you cannot remove a LOD from a mesh once it is imported (seriously?), plus, the LOD's import 90 degrees at the wrong angle so you have to fix that externally.
EDIT: There is now a "Re-Import LOD" button, so dealing with LODs is a bit more manageable! (Version 4.7.3) :)

LOD Export in 3DX Max - Perfectly normal

UE4 Imports them rotated 90 degrees  on the Y-axis

Nevertheless, I made 2 LOD's for 3 of my foliage meshes (Though I'm not going to import them until we decide to).

I spent some more time on the entrance tree; just trying to get it to not look out of place/bad still. I looked into paving stones for the starting area, discussed some important decisions on the game-play + cut-scenes with my team-mates, re-arranged some things in our level to make them sit better, and finally imported the hedge archway! Wooo!

Thankfully, Steve has come up with a fix for the "DEGENERATE TANGENT BASES" problem:

Importing Problem from last week

HOW TO FIX:

Create a cube and convert it to an editable MESH

Attach the box to the problem mesh

Delete the cube

Re-Export

Such an annoying problem that cost me more than half a days work trying to fix, easily solved in 2mins... Thanks Steve!
EDIT: May not work every time, unfortunately.

Tuesday wasn't a great day either if I'm honest... We had a big problem which was easily fixed by just going to a previous back-up of our file - It kept crashing when anything was altered in the level + upon opening it.
The other problems were down to getting the blueprints to work as we want them to. It took a while, but Dom figured it out at the end of the day and we could leave with our chins up!

I began making the broken paving stone which are going at the start of the level - we settled on square cracked & broken ones as opposed to hexagonal or mosaic shaped tiles. I tried to make a quick stone texture with moss on (AGAIN) as a base (No roughness or specular map for the rock & moss were used) just to see what it would look like, and I can certainly say it was better than my previous attempts:

As lame as it sounds... I'm currently watching every single one of the blueprinting essentials from the Unreal Engine channel on Youtube because I want to further understand what Dom is scripting & actually try to make something for myself - I made a working compass using an Enumeration table!

Tutorial:

Blueprint Essentials - 5 - Enum Variables

This week's life drawing outcome was average at best - I still nee to work on just relaxing more and trying new mark-making techniques because I know I can do better for sure:

I also spent some time in Z-Brush again to get more used to using it, and watching some workflow tutorials on making rocks.

Wednesday was such a good day in terms of learning! Kit (A Student from our 3rd Year), did a lecture on baking normal maps and how to best go about them. I didn't get into baking until the second year and it's proving extremely useful. However, it was good to get a "This is how you should do them because this is how it works" type of answer to "How do I bake a normal map?".

It's rather convenient because I also learnt a good technique to creating rocky surfaces in 3DS Max quite fast and easily, then baking them down for decent results for the time taken to produce..

Here's the tutorial I used:

Large-Scale Rubble Tutorial

Here's the results of using it on my pavement slabs (They're not as good, but they'll do!):

High Poly 1

High Poly 2

Low Poly Assets

Low Poly Wire-frame

Thursday was a really good day again! I went to the "How to write a covering letter" seminar in the morning which was very helpful, got my paving stones done (to an extent) and in engine looking al-right, Dom and I were looking at the lighting of the level/attempting to fix our translucency problem in the water (by half covering it up & half fixing it), and I re-imported/imported everything that needed to be put in at this stage since I hadn't done so for a while now.

Translucency Problem

Added underwater fog - It turns on only when the player is below a certain height in the level

TO IMPROVE THE PROBLEM: Delete the default atmospheric fog from the scene if you haven't already - It isn't necessary (For us at least).

I also re-arranged a lot of the trees at the start to a much more organised fashion but still keeping it natural:

And finally, we come to Friday...the 13th. I'm not superstitious or anything, but today wasn't the best of days in terms of productivity (at least that's what it felt like).

The 9am lecture was about our "extended piece of writing" task to be done over the Easter holidays. It's not a massively long essay, but I feel that what is required of us in terms of referencing is slightly odd. We need to write about our career aspirations and relate them to the progress we've made this year whilst referencing from secondary resources e.g. magazines. I get that you'd need to reference for things like "I was to be a good environment artist and in order to do so I need to know the process or program of X - Featured in magazine Y.". Or, "I want to work for company X, and I have the skills demonstrated in article Y which would make me perfect for this job role." But other than that, as it's a personal reflection, I don't see why it is completely necessary to do so. I'm probably missing the point slightly and not understanding fully what it is I need to do though, so I'll need to clarify things next Monday.

I did however manage to sort my accommodation for next year (Woohoo!), but it took me until about quarter to 12. After having had lunch, I went to finally start making a lamp and... I had to reimport animated fishes, but not just any fish, ones that just wouldn't want to work properly purely on the basis that we re-scaled them to a more appropriate size for the Game Engine - This causes major issues which we ended up not being able to fix, and just going with the original anyway; having to deal with offset pivots, and enlarged fish.

We know how to position pivots... These just like to stay where they are!

The good news is that we have a working fish blueprint with AI & an animation which come together to make an awesome asset!
Dom and I also spent a very long time trying to generate procedural kelp for the underwater area because you cannot paint skeletal meshes with the foliage brush (UE4 Version 4.7.2). Therefore, after a few failed attempts, we got one which generate in a box patch, and one in a circle patch (Which was actually quite challenging!).

Here's the box version:

Lastly, I spent a bit of time just re-importing the grass as Anya changed the textures so they work correctly with our current wind set-up - A couple of problems which took some more time, and before I knew it, it was about half 6 in the evening and I had to go...
So, nothing physically made in terms of modelling today, but a lot did actually go on.

Overall, I had a bit below average week in terms of work being produced, but in terms of learning, I had a great time and I'm so glad to be surrounded by the tutors & students we have at DMU so that I can learn all these cool new (to me) things!