Final Year Project - Week Thirteen: (24th April - 30th April)

Final Year Project - Week Thirteen: (24th April - 30th April)

Monday:

I started the Monday morning by just viewing my environment with fresh eyes, I wanted to make sure before advancing what the next steps were going to be. I needed to decide upon what steps would beneficial to my project with the time that I had left. Looking at the environment I still found that something was missing, I was aware that the lighting, post processing and even the material ID's were still unfinished, but something about how the majority of the room was of a single set of colours without any breaks felt wrong.

This lead to me attempting to find an appropriate material that could be used in small pockets around my environment, this would hopefully help break the environment sections up so that the area looked more interesting rather than just a single malformed sheet of one material.

I found by looking through the references I had, that a rusted, or cold dark metal tended to work well within the Darksiders universe.

I attempted to create yet another hand painted texture, by using a variety of different metal images as study for similarities that I should look out for and paint. This texture was successful more quicker than prior ones as I was becoming more confident with what I was doing and found that the texture did indeed compliment the colours in the environment with what I had chosen.

Fig 01.Cold Metallic Texture (Jones, 2017)

The texture was yet again duplicated, flipped and mirrored for all the previous reasons mentioned before. I even for certain sections of the environment created two bolt variations up in the top corner on separate layers which I could make use of. When testing the material out in the environment I found that it did a really good job of helping separate up the previous textures, especially making the floor panel much more detailed and more interesting to look at.

Fig 02. Metal Material Test (Jones, 2017)

Initially I only tested it on the floor panel and the ceiling panel, as I was expecting to only need to add that extra detail into those sections. Although later on I found that dotting the use of metal around almost every asset in the scene, even if subtly, really helped with the depth and variation in the scene.

Nearer the end of the day, I was thinking about making the bolts stand out more with the use of normal maps, during this thought and some initial researching, I came across the idea of painting normal maps. Although a lengthy process I was debating if this direction would be better suited to my needs than full out sculpted normal maps. A lot of the things in my scene could use sculpted normal maps as a bonus, although with the time frame that I had remaining and the kind of detailed assets I already had, I started to debate this as another option.

Tuesday:

The Tuesday once again began with me studying what I had available in my scene, I didn't want to start applying material ID's until I knew that I was certain I had all the different textures I wanted in the scene. I had been having a reasonable amount of trouble with the ceiling panels, I found that they were standing out took much in comparison to the rest of the environment because of how simple they were.

After some long thought, I decided that I needed some other material involved in the ceiling panels, this being because originally I had the brick normal map and texture in some sections, although I was told by multiple people that it doesn't make too much sense and would have been horribly difficult to built in reality.

In the end I found another page of reference which had a material that I thought I might be able to replicate that would work. The Elder Scrolls online art book had a Daedra shrine art piece which showed the ceiling panels consisting of multiple shard like patterns. I thought that I could maybe re purpose this to be made out of smooth sections of rock and create a ceiling pattern of my own which was similar.

Fig 03. Daedric Shrine (ZeniMax Online Studios, 2014)

The creation of the texture still took a fair amount of time, but I worked through the creation of it fairly comfortably. Before starting the creation of the texture I took a lot of time to decide between various patterns that I could make use of on the ceiling without breaking the overall style of the environment.

Fig 04. Shard Texture (Jones, 2017)

The texture looked unusual at first when applying it, although once it had been applied to each of the ceiling panels, I personally felt that it helped add that extra piece of complexity of the ceiling. I even ended up adding it into one or two other sections of the environment, such as the floor panel sections below the glowing symbols, and behind the mural wall's centre symbol.

I felt that this was a good choice as once again it helped the scene take on more of a coherent structure rather than just forms with a single texture.

The last thing that I ended up doing before calling it a night and working on the material ID's the next day was to add a little bit of detail to the edges where the ceiling panels connected. Some simple painted lines and then making sure they lined up helped to make the connections look more like structural supports for the ceiling rather than just odd bumped up meeting points.

Wednesday:

On the Wednesday I made sure to check everywhere in the scene to make sure I was happy with where I had placed all of the materials I planned to use.

I started with the mural wall asset first, as for each asset I had to re-import them once I had applied individual materials to each of the sections on an asset that I wanted. I did this to one asset first so that I could make sure to get the material settings just right for each kind of material. For example I wanted to make sure the Metallic and Roughness values on each material was correct, that way I could just duplicate the material and switch the texture for ease of applying textures to the other assets.

The floor sections and the mural wall were finished by the end of the day, as it took some sorting out to get the folders correct and each of the materials looking the way I wanted them too. I also while going through the environment found that I wanted to apply metal to some more of the areas, specifically behind each of the symbols in the environment as they had a backing that each of them rested upon, and I found that just having stone as backing on more stone didn't really do much for the visuals.

Thursday:

The Thursday I stayed indoors for the change of scenery and to relax a little bit, but I still accomplished a fair amount. I had been wanting to create the different ceiling panels for a while and hadn't got around to them. Considering at this point I had laid out the assets and the textures / materials, I felt comfortable with the idea of spending a day making the six same ceiling panels turn into six individual different ones.

Fig 05. Ceiling Panel Assets (Jones, 2017)

Considering I had the original ceiling panels as templates, the process was fairly simple for creating the others, all I needed to do was change the symbol in the middle, make sure everything was welded up and optimised correctly and then slight change the unwrap layouts.

This took most of the day to accomplish, along with making sure that the textures were also applied to them correctly, although in the end it was worth it, as it was the perfect touch to make the ceiling less modular and slightly more interesting.

Friday:

In the morning I applied the new assets and textures that I had created from home the day before, and I found that they worked perfectly. The Friday wasn't the most interesting day to write about, although I did manage to apply all of the material ID's for everything in the scene. This helped the scene immensely, and made everything look more correctly placed than before. I was originally worried that the black marbles shine was going to be too much, although in the end I feel as though the use of the metal helped to compliment it so that it didn't stand out too much in comparison to all the rock.

Saturday:

On the Saturday, I decided that the monolith asset needed some more time spent on it, this being because I felt as though the asset wasn't interesting enough to be the centre piece of the room. I spent some time debating if the material or layout of symbols on the top was what was holding it back.

I tired applying all of the textures I had created in different ways to see if anything clicked, although I found that in the end I needed another type of material.

Fig 06. Eye of Magnus (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011)

The Eye of Magnus from Skyrim which was mentioned in a previous post came back to mind, and I took note of its almost smooth rock like outer layer. I attempted making use of the black marble, but because of the materials consistent use in the scene, the artefact didn't stand out the way I wanted it too.

In the end I looked into gemstones on the internet, and spent a little time trying to recreate some sort of rough texture I could use as a kind of smooth rock / gemstone material for the monolith to be constructed from.

Fig 07. Gemstone Texture (Jones, 2017)

This material ended up being the base layer for the monolith, i originally anticipated it all to stay as one colour, but I found that changing the saturation in Photoshop to make each layer of the monolith a slightly different shade of the emissive for the symbols worked quite nicely.

The texture was once again duplicated, flipped and mirrored for the sake of having a texture which was the same size as the others, and also because it wouldn't be very noticeable on the assets in which it was applied.

I ended up creating another type of candle for the environment, I felt as though adding a little more variation to the candles would help the scene feel a little less repeated. The candle asset which had a collection of three candles melded together, and the single candle on a triangular bowl were the two options I already had in use in the scene. I decided to create a larger wax collection bowl but with a candle melting on top of another one of the shapes used in the scene.

Fig 08. Dodecahedron Candle Asset (Jones, 2017)

In the end I optimised all three of the candle assets, unwrapped them and textured them. I also made sure to apply the correct material ID's to where I needed. I spent the rest of the day placing the candles around the scene where I felt it necessary.

I also looked into simple matinee implementation so that I could add an animation onto the monolith in the centre.

Sunday:

The Sunday's main task was to focus on the project's lighting. I spent a lot of the day searching up tutorials or talks on the subject so that I didn't get started on it so quickly that I made a mess of it.

Tutorials on general lighting, and things like how light-mass functions in the engine were viewed.

Specifically sections on implementing god rays were particularly useful for my scene.

The largest amount of help with lighting I managed to gain though was from a handful of students on the course with me, I got a variety of tips from each of them which allowed me to view the lighting process from a slightly different angle.

Wherever there were candles I added a small glow, filler lights were placed around the room without shadows applied so that I could give the area a general base light intensity. Directional lights were placed to direct through one set of the windows so that there was a light beam hitting the ground in the shape of the windows.

The godrays were much simpler to implement than I had originally expected, I ended up creating a simple mesh to apply a translucent material too. The material used was researched from multiple tutorial videos, and in the end worked out quite well.

Fig 09. Godray Material (Jones, 2017)

The material works in the way that using two generated cloud like textures from different alpha channels allowed me to layer them on top of one another with a slow scroll being applied to each one in different directions. Then the material made it so that depending how close the camera was to material, it would slowly start to fade out until it was gone, this helped to simulate a smokey like effect to the material. A Fresnel to help give a shine to the edges of the whole material and a colour set helped to finish the material off nicely.

Fig 10. Godray Asset (Jones, 2017)

The lighting looked alright for a first attempt, although I found it frustrating that the point lights used as filler lights were obvious, this being because they left a domed light shape on the floor which was hard to get rid of without making the light too dull or not effective. Although this was an issue, It was a good start for me which I attempted to solve the following day.

Summary:

This week was starting to bring everything together, I had created a lot of things for the scene in this week alone, and I still had another week available to me to do stuff with. The environment was looking much more accomplished than it had before, and although the stress of the deadline was approaching, the progress of the scene allowed me to still feel confident with the advancements that I was making.

-Ryan Harlee Jones

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