Games Production: Professional Practice (Lighting Rig Reflection and feedback)

This post is to reflect on my Lighting Rig project.

Overall, this project has been challenging, mainly because it is a different workflow.

Here are some things I would have improved on given the opportunity.

• Research of workflow (As mentioned in previous blog posts, it is difficult to see how something is made, because it is locked behind NDA or someone is unwilling to give feedback on the workflow. So knowing this, I would have tried to reach out to more people working at Cloud Imperium and asked them if they were able to provide me some information.)

• Colour Coding mesh decals (I did add some material IDs to my mesh decals on the model as it helped me assign material instances to the decals in question, but I would have appropriately colour coded these mesh decals so I can apply the material instance with the correct colour to the mesh. I.e: Red material IDs with red mesh decals.)

• Lighting Balance (After feedback, some things that were said to me is that the lighting was imbalanced in some areas. But this was mainly due to the working space/colour of my personal monitor and university monitor, both being calibrated on different colour spaces. Albeit, this wasn't really my fault, but for future reference, I will look at the project on other computers to see how the lighting looks and make relevant changes.

• Re-arranging my prop UVs (At first I really didn't want to re-arrange my prop uvs as everything was fairly nicely unwrapped, but realising my secondary prop would add more to the scene, I instead tried to unwrap it to the best of my ability on the pre-existing unwrap, if time constraints were better, it would have been better to re-unwrap)

Here are some things that went well for this project.

• The environment looks the part and holds up as something that could be part of Star Citizen, albeit in a very rudimentary fashion, as I would use more texture sheets for a full environment vs the limitations we had.

• The rig is fairly well modelled and the decals applied to them add an extra layer of depth to the asset.

• The texel density is broken down in a good way, I believe that the way I justified texture sizes really helped with the overall look of the level.

One piece of feedback that was given to me was the fact that my light rig looked a bit too clean, so the thing that was advised to do was to add some edge damage to the piece.

I did this via an edge damage decal atlas, which I applied to the edges of the mesh, pulling planes over the UV space, then assigning a material ID to the section allowed me to change the parameters within engine to match the surrounding colours.