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.

It's starting to come together a bit more now, so here's the current level so far:

Not too bad of a week! Bring on the next one!

DMUGA Week 20 - Getting down to business + making water!

So, this excitingly magnificent week includes:
-Shader problems
-More shader problems
-Lighting problems
-Stress
-More stress!

Here's why:
I didn't get off to a great start on Monday because the only half-decent thing I managed to create was a water shader:

Material Instance

Water Shader

Water Tutorial:

Part 1 - UE4 - Interior Water #1

Part 2 - UE4 - Interior Water #2

I'm using the indoor water tutorial because it best fit the kind of look we wanted to achieve, we didn't want a murky river as it is a newly formed river of tears so it is quite blue and translucent.

In terms of anything else, we distributed the assets across the team today for who is going to make what. This was all perfectly fine until I actually tried to make some materials to test some things out first. I watched this semi-helpful tutorial on how to get a texture to 'creep' in through another one, but mine didn't turn out all that great unfortunately:

Snow tutorial:

Unreal Engine 4 Snow tutorial

My Concrete texture was tiled a lot in these images due to the size of the unwrap I was making it for:

I spent the evening tweaking so many tiny settings to get the water looking as best as I could, and also tried making some other materials which also didn't work out very well. In summary, it wasn't the greatest of days, but I did try some things out and all is good if it's practice (unless there's a fast approaching deadline... Which is always!)

Moving on to day 2 this week and it definitely went a lot better than the first because I learnt a lot as well as made some progress in the modelling. I spent a couple hours in Z-brush learning about it & sculpting one my of steps, then attempted my first Z-brush bake. It didn't go too well, but I learnt the process and definitely will apply it from now on:

I'm unable to get the baked low-poly version as an image, but I can assure you that you wouldn't even want to see it!

I also got the base mesh for the fountain modelled, and fiddled around with some more textures. My plan for this is to sculpt the fountain in Z-brush.

Life drawing was really fun this week as we tried a new method which involved sketching whilst the model was moving around, and stopping for 20 seconds repeatedly. This got me more relaxed and was very helpful in speeding up my drawing:

There were more problems with the water shader/(s) which we had to fix, plus, get more in-depth with our grass plan!

Here's one clump I painted - It wasn't the best, but I don't dislike it completely either - Not sure if we'll end up using it, but it is there as a back-up:

Not an actual texture sheet of course - just a screenshot from Photoshop

As Wednesday rolled on, yet again major issues with the water shader/(s) not working properly, the lighting effected it dramatically, and some more stress piled on whilst trying to combine a translucent water with an opaque to get nice reflections... It worked kind of:

Opaque Water

Underwater

Translucent Water

We decided it looked a bit better with the translucent water so that's the one we're going for at this stage.
I managed to get in some 'okay' grass shaders which took a VERY long time as there are numerous problems with lighting on foliage alphas e.g. grass. I ended up changing it to 'UNLIT' and just modifying it that way. This will be used in lit areas, but we may have to make another version for use in darker areas.

A couple of flowers I got done also.

Thursday was a relaxing day in comparison to the others because there was mainly just the stress of the grass not looking good in shaded areas of the map, however, Anya came up with a way to 'fake it' and it works pretty well! So I was really happy about that and it was a big weight off our shoulders.
I also tried a new technique today when it came to making a bush (Which I've never done before!). It involved making a high-poly version of a section of the bush, then baking it to a single plane. I've done similar things before, but not using the mesh-paint tool to paint the leaves onto the mesh.
It turned out 'OK', it wasn't as good as what I expected, but it was decent enough in my opinion:

Flower & Bush Models - 3DS Max

I also got round to texturing some fungi, and importing all of the meshes so far!

Friday was surprisingly a good day as I felt as if we made some good progression. I sorted some minor problems out, made the beginnings of our "DarkWorld", and did some general touch-ups on materials & lighting! The 'DarkWorld' I think will be one of my favourite areas because it has an ominous feel to it all, and I think that when there are trees/foliage, the table, house, & 'glowy-ness' fungi etc in the scene, it'll be really good.

Through the rabbit hole... Alice's Dark World

I think we've made some good stuff this week, just really need to speed up a bit so we can actually get it done on time!