Final Year Project - Week One: (30th January - 5th February)
- Ryan Harlee Jones
- Feb 6, 2017
- 6 min read
Final Year Project - Week One: (30th January - 5th February)
What will the blog posts consist of?
This post is the first of many to log the progress of my final year project as university. The way I plan to write out each of the upcoming blog posts will be in the layout of a subsection for each day. This will allow others to evaluate my progress as they wish, as well as log my own endeavours so that I can debate if my work ethic is efficient with each week overview.
Monday:
The Monday was my first day officially beginning the project, early in the morning at around 9:15am, I had my weekly scheduled two hour session with my project supervisor.
This session consisted of my supervisor asking me about what my project was going to consist of, and advising me on how to advance with my project proposal.
I spent the rest of the day building up a draft of my project proposal, making sure to fill out every section on the checklist so that once the draft was complete, I could do a second sweep of the draft to hopefully head towards finalising it.
Tuesday:
The Tuesday was spent going over the second sweep of my proposal draft, I worked through the remaining areas that I hadn't filled out the previous day, and changed up a few of the draft sections.
During this, I found that one of the checklist zones was having a schedule of some kind, in response to this, I spent the majority of the day creating myself an excel spread sheet and planning my actions as best as I could for the upcoming project deadlines.
Fig 01. Personal Schedule (Jones, 2017)
Wednesday: For Wednesday I finalised the rest of my brief, by the end of the day I had added in formatting for the layout of the proposal, along with images and font changes so that the proposal looked aesthetically pleasing. I also made sure to add and gather references for the images that were used in the document, along with tutorials and useful pages that would relate to the research sections of my project such as looking into sculpting techniques and UE4 visual effects tutorials.
I then sent the draft PDF, off to my supervisor for early feedback so that I could tweak and change it if necessary.
Thursday: Thursday consisted of me working on another project that I had done on the prior weekend. The prior Friday to Sunday I had taken part in a two day Gamejam, starting midday Friday, ending midday Sunday. I spent the day tweaking the trailers for both Gamejam, and a previous module, so that people were happier to use them on their portfolios, and to iron a few silly mistakes such as volume spikes out.
After doing this, with my spare time I looked at some simple, introduction level, official UE4 tutorial playlist on blueprints. I watched these in anticipation to learn how the system works at a base level, so that I can work towards making use of the material nodes more efficiently when coming to the stage of implementing everything.
The rest of the day consisted of me and my Gamejam team going to a small student planned event where people were able to come along and play a variety of games, including the Gamejam teams games. We attended for the experience, but also to make sure that our game got some feedback from players, which in the end was very useful for us if we planned to continue the project in the future.
Fig 02. Introduction to Blueprints (Unreal Engine, 2017)
Friday: Friday was built up of a variety of things, firstly I created a draft asset list from what I already understood of how I wanted my project to be. This throughout the day changed quite frequently as I laid out the scene in UE4 as a white box scene. Doing this back and forth method allowed me to understand how the environment was going to be built up, and also realise where different things such as supports and torches could be placed without cluttering up the scene too much.
The white box also allowed me to prepare for getting the scene scaling correct. I preemptively created a block which was the Unreal default characters scale, so that I could make sure to create everything with measurements equal to one another. Doing this allows me to start modelling without having to come back to the model later for scaling issues, therefore hopefully saving time.
Fig 03. Early White Box (Jones, 2017)
After going back and forth between my asset list draft and the white box scene, I then spent the last few hours of the day looking at introduction level tutorials to ZBrush on the official website. I have prior experience using ZBrush, but only through dabbling in the menus and attempting to use the software myself, so I figured an official introduction to the program would yield some helpful results.
Saturday: Saturday was a fairly productive day, I went into the university labs and started to choose an area to begin modelling one of the assets from. Although, during this process I realised that I knew what I wanted, but I kept pulling up different references to remind myself of certain consistencies. This led to me creating myself two mood boards, one for the art style and Architecture builds, and another for the modelling and texturing reference.
Fig 04. Art Style / Architecture Moodboard (Jones, 2017)
While gathering references, I came across an artist who regularly marked their work and had created models/sculpts and textures for the Legion DLC of World of Warcraft. When looking at her portfolio page, I noticed that she also had some competition work for Darksiders 2 involved on the page, meaning that this artist was perfect reference for my project. I sent her an email to compliment her, and also ask for possible advice in undertaking my project in a hope that she gets time to reply. Although, when going through her portfolio, she had shared a free downloadable, three JPEG tutorial on her working process for one of her assets, this was very informative, although a little brief. It was a tutorial she displayed at Blizzcon 2016, and will be used as valuable reference.
Fig 05. Modelling & Texturing Moodboard (Jones, 2017)
After I had done some research, and gathered some reference material I made sure to get started on at least one of my assets in the scene. I decided to get started on the main floor piece which would cover the scene, I followed the advice of the artist's tutorial and created a 2D image that I would use as reference for the pattern that the floor would have upon it.
Fig 06. 2D Floor Pattern (Jones, 2017)
I then continued onward to create the floor at a very simple base level, so that I could start to bring base assets together to get a good feel for the overall scene. The floor panel ended up looking much simpler than the image counterpart, although the individual shape icons that slot into the floor are yet to be created.
Fig 07. 3D Floor Panel (Jones, 2017)
I then began to play around with the base shape of a few other assets in preparation for creating more of them, although after playing around with some wall designs, I started to feel as though I needed to do some small sketches to better design the separate environment pieces so that they worked together more efficiently, I then packed up for the day in anticipation to start designing the pieces on my next work session.
Sunday:
The Sunday was much more relaxed compared to the other days in the week, since the Sunday is my scheduled day off to do other things if needed, or to just do what I fancy.
Although I ended up spending some time dabbling with my portfolio website and even making a Vimeo account to upload all the trailers for work I was involved in, so that I could link them to my portfolio. Apart from fiddling with a few pages and uploading work, not much else was accomplished on the Sunday.
Overview:
For the first week of the project, I personally feel that looking back over the week I'm working at a fairly good pace and speed. Although while working throughout the week I was strongly under the impression that I was being lazy and was behind with my project. Considering that the project has only just started, and the deadline for the proposal is still around a week ahead, I'm actually in a pretty safe spot. Hopefully the following weeks are just as useful or better for my project.
- Ryan Harlee Jones
References:
Unreal Engine (2017) Introduction to Blueprints (v4.8). Available at: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/PLZlv_N0_O1gY35ezlSQn1sWOGfh4C7ewO/gHdwOiR0D0A/index.html (Accessed: 06/02/2017) Fig 02.
Fanny Vergne (2017) Vergne Fanny 3D Modeler / Environment Artist. Available at: http://www.fannyvergne.com/ (Accessed: 05/02/2017)
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