Games production: Professional Practice (Week 6)

This week I started the captain's table brief.
I decided to go with the idea of an explorer.
I used to play a game when I was younger called 'Nancy Drew - Secret of the Scarlet Hand', which is a detective game, but based in a museum of Mayan culture and civilisation.

Front cover of Nancy Drew: Secret of the scarlet hand, containing a central part of the game, the Mayan Monolith.

Here is another image from the game containing Mayan symbols, the faces especially in Mayan culture were very common, some refer to letters, some refer to numbers, but all were common within the culture.

Example of a puzzle from the game containing Mayan symbols

Mayan numeral system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals

Example of the Mayan writing system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script

Another example of glyphs depicting the gods which correlate to the Mayan Day calendar

I thought it would be a unique idea to add call-backs to traditional explorers, such as Lara Croft, Indiana Jones, etc. By adding the stereotypical objects like an explorer hat and compass, but by also adding in some Mayan Jade artefacts, which were of great significance to the Maya, this would add to the overarching narrative.

Collated reference board

This is the concept I designed for the scene, initially I wanted to re-create the entire room, but seeing as this would eat in to the tri budget, I thought it would be best not to go ahead with this idea. But I still planned out the table props and layout.
I wanted to build an old fashioned office around the time period of 1930, as this seems like a peak time for exploration, after the rebuilding of society from WW1, now is the time to go out and explore. Which makes a lot of sense, as Indiana Jones is set in the 1930s - as an additional idea, to cement the date, adding coins of the time period could help push the narrative further, by telling the audience it isn't in present day through a small feature such as this could add some story telling elements.

I started building props inside Max, I wanted this to be a project about realism and believability, so trying to model everything to a realistic standard as to not look faceted would be a must. It was really difficult to optimise some meshes, especially the lamp, compass, telescope and globe. Mainly because these objects contained a lot of cylinders and they are difficult to optimise.

I went for the second desk option within my reference.
I did like the first desk I found, but realised it would be too small of a space to lay objects upon and would look quite cluttered.
At least with this desk, it would have a nice parallelism with the windows that I am going to boolean into the walls.
The wall is also made with a wallpaper image that is free to use from the website Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/illustrations/background-pattern-texture-leaves-6737492/ by user drabbitod.
I used this design because it was perfect to represent my theme of exploration, exploring the dense jungle to get to the Mayan temples.
I took this in to substance painter and made a trim sheet out of it, consisting of the wallpaper and wood trim inserted - I helped the process by creating this material ID.

Wall material ID

Wall trim

Design by drabbitod on Pixabay

While texturing, I sourced some textures, including a map of central America, made by Rigobert Bonne and Jean Lattre. - https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4390.ar170300/
I believe it would have taken me a while to make a map from scratch, so I tried my best to find one within the public domain that I could use, preferably an older map to make it more authentic.

https://theantiquarium.com/products/central-america-colton-1855

Originally, I thought about using this map, but decided against it for a few reasons. Reason 1 being that it was too small to cover the area I wanted on my modelled map, there would have been lots of dead space around the edges. My second reasoning is that it wasn't geographically accurate enough compared to the previous map. Though having colour on the map would have been nice, but it wasn't necessary as I wanted something more accurate.

Self Directed - Procedural mud puddle material

Today I had a thought about a procedural mud puddle material.

I was thinking how I could lay several instances of a texture on top of each other to make it seem like the water level was rising.

I first got an image I took and put it into substance sampler.

Using the clone stamp and tiling features in sampler I was able to remove the seams and annoying objects like the pebble.

I exported 3 variants of the same texture, 1 texture was just mud, another was partially waterlogged and another was 100% waterlogged.

Using methodology surrounding various nodes in unreal I exposed a single parameter that controlled the water level.

Full material

This parameter was linked to varying funcitons, on the base colour, it was linked to 3 Lerps which was controlled by the exposed parameter, which meant I could fade between the textures as the slider was pulled up from the default to 1.

Secondly, I have a channel packed texture which I used to control the roughness and AO as default, but I inverted the roughness map so I was able to clamp the values in order to control the metallic, as puddles aren't strictly 'metallic' but adding metallic helps the roughness look more reflective in this instance.

I also applied specular which would be clamped from a grey and white value as to affect the whole material, to give puddles specular highlights and to turn it down when no puddles were visible.

Adding a divide between the parameter and a flatten normal, I was able to flatten the normal so the texture would seem flat, but then increased the normal as the puddles rise.

Finally, I used bump offset to add a touch of depth to my material in order to make it look more 3D.

Base colour, Specular, Metallic

AO, Roughness, Normal

Bump offset

I encountered many problems when trying to make this material, the amount of nodes became confusing and knowing what I plugged into where became obnoxious. 

Additionally after trying to figure out some node functions, I just swapped out various nodes with one another to get the result I wanted. I.e: divide is the opposite of multiple, add is the opposite of subtract, etc.

Final result

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.

Games Production: Professional Practice (Lighting Rig Finalisation)

This post is for the finalisation of the first professional practice brief.

I originally wanted to make windows for my scene so you could look out into space which would help cement the sci-fi theme. Furthermore, I thought it was a bit empty so I added a sun. This was going to be made in 3ds max, but realising I didn't have any more tri count for the scene, I decided to use the default sphere that comes with unreal.

Furthermore, I broke down the environment texel density to include the sun textures - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAtUtTBs using this tutorial, it helped me create the sun in the background.

Furthermore, because we have to author the textures ourselves, I created the textures using substance designer and imported them into unreal.

Sun texture using designer

As to not make the sun look exactly like that in the tutorial, I went with something that was not only grounded, but contrasting. Because my interior is mainly orange, having a blue star like that of Sirius, it would provide some much needed offset and asymmetry. 

To finalise the LCD screen and make it look like an actual screen, I followed this tutorial. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIQrNJUhVjA

Then when applied to a material instance, I could change some of the settings and use the emissive as a mask to only be affected by the effect.

Initial high res screenshot

Render with photoshop post processing.

The original screenshot was quite dark, so in photoshop I boosted the brightness and lowered the contrast slightly, furthermore, I added light bloom around the lights using the vivid light blend mode to give the lighting a halo around it to fake the emissive without it being ruined by Unreal's post process volume.
I additionally added a colour LUT to the post process to enhance colours like previously mentioned, additionally including a selective colour, which helped me identify what colours to boost.

As some additional feedback, I was given advice about the scene, how it looks 'too dark' - furthermore, I was told it looked a bit bare.
So I went back to optimise my environment a bit more, by doing so, I was able to add a cylindrical mesh which would act like cable.
To keep within the tri count, I invested my time into looking at making a spline mesh to help with instancing within engine. This gave me the ability to create a cable within engine without affecting my tri count by individually modelling the entire cable in 3ds max.

Additional cables added via spline mesh

Spline mesh Blueprint construction script taken from this video by Ryan Laley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKIiWa19EMI

Working on feedback, I additionally added an extra prop, it was difficult to get around a UV problem. When I tried to re-import the mesh into substance painter, which included the new prop, I wasn't able to because of it being located on a drive that my PC didn't recognise. So as a work around, I textured the prop in a separate substance file, exported the textures, then I exported a 'render UVW template' from 3ds max, of which, I put in Photoshop and erased around the props to add the new prop to the sheet. 

Prop idea reference

Adding the new prop to the scene

Self Directed - Abbey Pumping Station Compositional Thumbnails

As Part of self directed, I went to abbey pumping station with the 2nd year students to draw on location and gather some photo texture reference.

Here are the compositional thumbnails I generated.

The purpose of this task was to see what interesting angles and objects I could include, it was about quick mark making to store enough information for future reference.

Games Production: Professional Practice (Week 4)

This week's focus was on finalising assets and the engine imports.

I have had issues with unreal 5 in the past, due to lumen not being compatible with screenspace effects by default, I felt like I lost control with some of my projects, however, I found out how you can re-enable the SSAO within the post process volume. Typing this command into the defaultengine.ini config file, I was able to regain control of the ambient occlusion.

r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO=0

Screenspace Ambient Occlusion now re-enabled in engine

Setting up emissive via material only on the Material IDs attached to meshes.

Rig imported into the level.

Rig animation test gif

Using the Level sequencer inside unreal, I was able to fulfil the implied functionality like in the concept that was provided in the brief.

Example of level sequencer with keyframes for animation loop

For the props, I was originally going to the crate on its own. Until a friend mentioned to me I could possibly do something on top of crates, so I opted for a bolt and spanner, which would act as narrative as if someone was helping to fix the rig with some old school equipment.
I managed to get all of these within budget of the required 2k tris for the narrative prop budget.

Prop modelling

Prop texturing

Prop UV unwrap sheet

Using the same principle as the lighting rig, I decided to bake some normals on to a plane and use this as the decal atlas for the environment.

This is how the normal map ended up coming out as when exporting from substance painter. I admit, this could have been a bit better optimised in terms of texture space. However, when I was making this atlas, I was looking at my references and there was only so much normal information I could pull out of them, which left some black spaces.

Additionally, I didn't want to fill up too much room as pulling a plane over an atlas can sometimes cause bleed because parts of the bake are too close together, resulting in unwanted overlap.

Floor texture inside Substance Designer

Going along with the consistent texel density, this floor texture I made in Designer came out as a 512.
When looking at my reference from Star Citizen, I saw a few references that had rubber style flooring.
I couldn't remember how to find/create a triangle inside of Designer, so I created a base rounded triangle inside of Photoshop, then imported it into Designer.

I plugged this into a tile sampler, which allowed me to make a pattern in the floor, I then dragged this directly in to the normals. I left the normal intensity as default, mainly because I would come back and edit the normals using the flatten normal node inside of Unreal.