Final Year Project - Week Eleven: (10th April - 16th April)
- Ryan Harlee Jones
- May 6, 2017
- 4 min read
Final Year Project - Week Eleven: (10th April - 16th April)
Editor Note: Due to deadlines I started taking out my blog time to progress more on my project, this decision was made because of how my progress and research was going, and I knew that my blog could wait longer than the project could. I keep a track of my progress on a small word document, so I can still update this correctly. Although, in this post there may be a lack of images due to most of the work that was accomplished in this week was saved over with other attempts.
Monday:
The second week of being home started with me getting to work on the textures for my environment, I was pleased with how the effects had come along and what I had learnt, so I turned my attention to this area.
I started by attempting to hand paint the details I needed onto the floor panel in the environment, as this was one of the largest assets in the scene. I mainly focused on creating a worn away although moderately smooth rock texture for the floor. This texture ended up being practise and for getting me into the swing of hand painting textures, all though at this point in time I was trying to envision the kind of texture layout I wanted for the scene.
The stairs and centre floor panel assets were also looked at, at this point I was debating to fake in some lighting through the textures by giving each of the assets their own painted in shadows and gradients. I gave this a shot but decided that the difference was too subtle by itself, and still needed other details to make the assets work.
The floor area had rough colours and some sort of texture detail hinting at the kind of materials that I wanted them to be, although I found that these were not good enough and I needed to rethink my approach, I saved over the original attempts with later attempts sadly.
Instead, for the end of the day I looked at business cards on the internet for the Expo that was approaching, I placed the needed information onto the template document, and my logo with a rough red ring design. This wasn't going to be the design I went for, although I had thought about the things I wanted on the card and possible colour scheme.
Tuesday / Wednesday:
Both the Tuesday and Wednesday were used so that I could catch up on my blog entries. Both of these entries needed various screenshots when possible and recollection of some events that I hadn't noted down in great detail in my weekly log. Thursday:
The Monolith asset was my first port of call on the Thursday, this asset was going to be in the centre of the room, and I had a fairly clear idea of how I wanted the asset to look.
The texture for the asset was a rough rock with glowing symbols of various colours upon it. Originally I placed all of the symbols as the green which is used in the portal effects, although I decided to change the symbols to their associated elemental colour.
Afterwards I thought I would try having a go at the medium connector assets in the scene, mainly because the asset consisted of multiple single bricks, and I wanted to practise my hand painting skills on one of the bricks by themselves. This lead to some improvement, and at the time I thought that I was pleased with the texture that I had created. Once again, this was saved over before hand from another attempt which was later more successful. Although, for the end of night, I decided to watch some videos online of multiple people hand painting brick walls and other similar materials in a hope that I would be able to recreate the textures at a better standard later in the week.
Friday:
I spent the Friday cutting and pasting the texture I had created for the medium connectors across to other brick worked areas to see how things were going to look. This gave me a fairly good indication of what to expect ion the majority of the areas in the scene, although this lead me to the realisation that I should probably continue from where a single texture would be seen the most.
I decided that for for the next few days I was going to make sure that the brick worked wall panels that were dotted around the environment was going to be worked on next. This was because the indented panels in most of the assets I had created were going to have a normal map of a brick wall applied to these sections. This was a consistent part of my environment and I needed to make sure that it worked efficiently. Saturday:
The Saturday was used to take my application further with one of the jobs I had applied for before hand. I had to create a video for the company I had applied for, and this took some time to get right, so this day didn't allow me to progress on my project any further. Sunday:
After finalising my submission to the company I had applied for I continued on with my project.
I started by finishing off my brick wall asset, so that I could prepare to high to low bake it onto a flat plane, this was going to allow me to simply gain a normal map that I could make use of in my environment.
After testing this normal map output a couple of times, I found that it was working the way that I wanted it to. Although, the issue was that the brick layout on the wall was all way too uniform, and looked too neat, and even a little boring. I decided to make some changes to the normal map after I had done a final sweep of some of the asset UV's that needed changing.
Summary:
This week during the Easter holidays had been one that hadn't shown much progress, although it had given me plenty of time to think about what was needed to advance, and how I wanted things to be when it came to the final product. I found this invaluable to me when I finally got on track with creating textures that I was pleased with, and defiantly helped me to become more focused in the coming week of what I was going to need to do.
-Ryan Harlee Jones
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