14th Jan Handin Final Renders

Beauty Shots

Video Fly Through of Level

Art style

I chose this scene primarily because of the challenge of recreating its very dynamic lighting. A scene full of metallic materials, (greys) and very sharp white light coming from the ceiling above. The problem I had with references was every shot of the lab was nothing more than zoomed in pan shots, could not see anything of the surrounding environment just the odd objects like the egg incubators. For a very dull scene full of ruin and desertion Gears of War became my main influence for art direction. I think some of my scene can resemble the colours and de-saturation used in gears throughout. A big reason why GOW became a huge influence was because the assets I needed to build would be very similar in art style, for example, mouldy broken desks, computers, tables and chairs can be seen throughout gears of war. There are also levels that I used as references, one level was a lab itself where there are pods just like mine scattered everywhere, another level against a berserker where you end up in a large greenhouse, this became my final piece of influence that redirected my project from a dull unlit lab, to an open lit laboratory. Summary of my Art direction was largely Grungy, broken mouldy items

Great Deal of Optimisation

I knew from the beginning that my scene was going to be full of assets, and a large range of textures. From the start I was not too worried about my poly count and texture size although I would build my assets to a targeted count. But soon enough down the line my Main Lab started to become quite packed, along with very strong CPU using Lighting defined by a lot of God Rays. With all the foliage and alpha transparency’s I have been using amongst most of my assets my frame rate was starting to really be effected, around the 20-30 fps. Optimisation became a huge part in the succession of this project

Recycling Textures

Greatest Optimisation was the ability to recycle textures, you can’t really notice but the Beams, the Pipes, and the window Borders, and the support railing for the crane has been made completly by one single texture at 512x512 resolutions. These assets fill up the entire scene and are the most used. The fact that now my whole scene is mostly running from one material really helps smooth the engines ability to have to load loads of textures.

Cheap Lighting.

The creation of cheap fog allowed me to delete a lot of my dynamic lighting, Also a mistake I made in the material editor with the blending of two alpha channels made the fog interact with the light to create a nice blend of beaming light amongst a moving texture.

Performance Optimising

Speed tree was used in order to create my leaf foliage. The reason for this is using the foliage factory volume really does hog CPU performance; at least it did for me. Foliage factory way used to spread leaves on the floor around my level, with a small amount of 100 which came to a total of 600 poly's really effected performance.

I used speed tree with full optimisation creating a large vine full of leaves in just 320 tri’s, however the great deal of use started to affect my performance once again. But I found out why. The wind effect inside speed tree writes itself into the branch model by default. Although the wind settings in UDK were off it had no effect on animating thousands of vertices. I found away to disable the wind within speed tree. 

Technical Achievements

What I have achieved here has come a long way from week 8; my level has been completely been redesigned to which I think it now gives some justice to Jurassic park. What I had struggled with for so long was my lighting, using techniques of de-saturating the environment and lighting the shadow maps played a huge part in corrupting my lighting. Just a little bit of de-saturating deeply affects the colourings and the power emitting from lights. I spent many weeks throwing lighting everywhere and still couldn’t not uplift the dullness that constantly rendered. It was from this point I re designed my whole entire level from scratch. Inside Maya I created my level as a whole mesh; this gave me greater control in providing areas to light the scene. In my redesign I created fan like air-condioning units which light could pass through and create interesting shadows from the rings the light hits, also re done my windows so the light could pass through and create grid like shading as well. The effect the shadows give plays a huge role in the creating a level of deepness and reality. The hardest part was the colouring and power of the lights. I believe I have done a great attempt at trying to achieve very complex lighting within an indoor environment, the fact most of my lighting is concentrated from the outside creating this very small blend inside works very well.

Prop Realtime Render Sheets

Egg Incubator & Dino Pods

Robotic Arm, Power Generator

Computer Equipment, Support Beams

Next Stage of Development

The focus on this level has been neglected this week for other assignments. However I have been investigating problematic areas and studying tutorials of level design. These tutorials have demonstrated cheap and easy ways to separate noticeable tiling textures using alphas along the surface. Problems that still persist are my God Rays. I still do not understand why they do not work. The editor preview of the level displays but in game hides them. I posted a few posts of forums, had a few answers back on UDK’s official Forums and hadn’t received a reply that could fix the problem. Feedback received was stuff I have already tried like toggling with the global illumination, and world info.

After a few pieces of feedback it has come to my attention to edit the layout of my level. Try and change the level from a box to something more interesting a dynamic. I had already noted this earlier on and started creating new meshes that act as rooms. This hides more of the main walls surface and gives the illusion of other areas. But this doesn’t fix the illusion of square room. After looking deeply into unreal’s level I have noticed a good use of BSP’s is for areas such as my own level. For hallways, large box type areas. If I am to reedit my environment mesh I will do so by recreating it all with BSP for more control and quicker results.

As the holiday is approaching I really want to now start editing all my textures and models. My plan from the start was not to spend too much time in creating props and textures for the alpha presentation. Now I have gained that time I have the ability to edit, improve and just really experiment with design. Some Zbrush sculpturing would be nice in some models like my pillars. I would like to have a few slashes from dinosaur claws etc.

These last few weeks the level has started to be neglected towards other assignments but I have made the time to do so. Still 100% confident in finishing this level to all my potential.

Week 9: Slow progression, a week of tutorials, practice, optimising & re-design

Optimisation

A large portion of this week has been slowly optimising my level. I mean the term slowly because I am experimenting in ways to reduce texture sizes without losing the quality of my level. I have noticed my overall performance on my home computer starting to drop in frame rate. At University how ever there is no loss in performance. Although considering the criteria my level is at this moment perfectly suitable for hand in as the map will be tested on the university machines. I would like to take the practical approach and really try and optimise this map well enough that even my computer handles it well. A large portion of my poly count rendered in each frame was taken up by thousands of leaves which had been scattered around using the foliage factory volume. 6 polygons each leaf was and for the level of detail was too many. It made sense to just reuse the texture on the floor that the leaves rested on and re-use the leaf texture on the floor texture. This way no need for millions of alphas, and large portion of poly’s will be cut out of the scene.

Tutorials

I believe I’m at a stage now to give some life to my environment and start adding the extra elements that create some realism to scene. Things like introducing particle effects like steam coming from those many hundreds of pipes I have. Decals for adding some grime and dirt in areas. At the moment my new textures that applied to my alpha version of my map were a bit clean in areas. Using decals I will have full control where dirt can be applied.

Most of my research of Unreal has come from this very website, very useful step by step process and explanation

http://www.hourences.com/tutorials/

Re-design

It struck me whilst game testing my map that the layout needs to be toyed about. Game testing with unreal tournament playability is miss-leading because of its very fast action paced style of game play. My inspiration of the creation of this level was Gears of War. A more tactical slower approach but with more dimension. I know the assessment criteria are to be marked by the screenshots taken at the end of development. But at least when I take my screenshots, even if they are quite different to the movie screenshots, at least there will be a big reasoning behind it all.

 I re-designed my map into Gears of War. The development inside Gears of War Editor is slightly different in areas such as the scaling. Everything had to be scaled up x2. This was a problem for the import of my environment. Instead I built the environment all out of BSP which actually works a lot better than my current scene. Have a lot more playability; control of textures and the setup is so much easier. I’m thinking of using this method in my current level.

 In this re innovative approach to my map I decided to make the environment a lot larger, I feel at present my UDK version is relatively small, some of my scaling is defiantly off and I believe my gears of war version fixes that. Rebuilding this level helped highlight points, more importantly it allowed me to make drastic changes without affecting anything in UDK. Testing the game play and implementing AI provides a lot more depth to Unreal’s Game play testing. This version however is only basic, does not contain proper lighting, all my props and full layout as it’s not important.

Week 8 – Alpha Presentation, Massive Progression

In preparation for my alpha presentation I put all my remaining time and effort into showing my level in a near finished state. By this i don’t mean all the shaders, effects etc and 100% model completition but completed to a point where the audience can easily see the visualisation to the end point of final completition. I really progressed these last few days, biggest change was redoing the whole lighting again with out lightmass like I stated on my last blog entry. This time playing around with the lighting i believe i have progressed, still have a lot of work to do, however I’m still in mid progression to create excusable scenarios for certain lighting to make point. Certain Areas I wish to add Dynamic lighting, lighting that flickers and sparks etc maybe from a broken light, or a glow from a machine that may be half functional from remaining backup battery sources. In preperation for this i have created some large generators that would enhance the belief. What has worked very well since last blog entry is the large area of roof that has been destroyed exposing the environment to outside lighting to a large scale. With this comes the need to trying to fake bouncing lighting to that of radiosity effect.

Ambient occlusion or shadows have played up here simply because I did a tiledshot 10 to capture this, the rest were done in tiledshot 2 format which has better results, have no idea why.

Alpha Presentation

I believe the presentation went half and half, i showed some nice visual stuff but when I finished the presentation i realised had so much more to show and say. Alot of the things I prepared I didn't show like my Gantt Chart to show just how quick i have progressed from my enitial plan. Forgot to talk about my references in creating the props.  In preperation of the presentation I created a powerpoint presentation which was going to be my main part and then i prepared a one and a half minute matinee sequence in unreal. When it came to the actual presentation it was known that the main computer to host the presentations were not working correctly to show the unreal stuff and so had to host this on my own computer. This made me change my mind on the the technique of presenting, last minute i decided to showcase my unreal project as the whole presentation and try and relate areas back to my pre-prepared powerpoint slide show. It probably wasnt the best idea considering how quickly i had to re-prepare just how im going to show this off but i believe it really helped just trying to explain areas of trouble, and techniques like shaders etc. But like i said earlier i missed alot of important points which if i ran my presentation would have reminded me so abit dissapointed about that. Overall seemed to have got a good reaction to the quality of my scene which im pleased about. I think i learnt to a lesson to stick with what you have prepared.

Extension

                My scene has now extended to match my first map design, extension  of a hall way, several vista’s to create a feel of space and adds more to the environment than just straight narrow paths. Although my intention of the level design is to be strongly narrative it still needs some elements to break this up. What seems to be seen in my references is a half reception area, half green house for study of plant life, but its hard to determine considering there is so much exposed to the outside world that plant life has taken over the whole scene. My weakest point at the moment is creating descent looking foliage, its something i haven’t really had to do much but its something im very eager to create at high standards. Next  few days just going to go over some tutorials, I have no problems making descent alphas but my knowledge of referencing plants i don’t know much about. I’ve took some photos myself but can’t really see what is use-able.

To make my environment scene more believable i want to add some extra details like a vent around the pods on the floor. Some of these have broken glass which would have made the water leak all over the floor. I think creating signs of where the water has drained away is just one of those little extras to make something more indepth. Lighting I think will never be truely finished to how i want it to look, it most certainly isn’t easy to pull off.


Thanks To Nathan for the light mass advice, has paid off quite nicely and a lot easier to light up my scene.

Week 7: Development on Lighting, Alpha Preparation things to do over the weekend

Again it’s been another slow progressive week, this week I decided to start creating a new set of lights without using light mass global illumination. This creates a harder task of creating realistic lighting as it gets rid of all the techniques light mass uses, like emitting bouncing light, this is crucial in my scene because it’s the only way I can have excusable reasons for lighting up my scene apart from the amber coming through the large windows.

These particular shots I created within a few minutes. Creating lighting without light mass is incredibly quick especially the build time; dropping from 1 hour build time in high quality to 45 seconds without light mass shows a big difference. This make life a lot easier for me so I can quickly correct mistakes rather than wasting so much time for it to look rubbish.

Lighting without light mass is defiantly my way to go, I do however miss its effects, I thought they made the scene work very well, but that was with so much strong lighting from lights that you shouldn’t really use too much. Now I’m building with mostly point lights, this is going to really improve overall performance, there’s going to be a huge cut in CPU/GPU performance to process all the lighting, this also gives me an advantage of introducing some fancy dynamic lighting to emphasise some atmosphere. At the moment lighting looks still and boring, creation of some dynamic lighting and shadows to show a bit of movement in the scene I believe will work a treat

Without Lightmass

Over the Weekend

My presentation is going to be simple and straight to the point, over this weekend I will be producing some very high quality video renders out from UDK using the matinee and kismet sequences to demonstrate the level as a walk through.

Before this I need to do the following

• ·         Finish as many props as possible
• ·         Reception desk
• ·         Misc Objects on desks
• ·         Dynamic lighting
• ·         Blockouts for hallway and reception scene

Top of Form Bottom of Form

Week 6: A Long week Of Lighting  Problems & Solutions, Lightmapping Problems, World Properties and PostProcessing Effects  Its a been a very long week, a lot of hours has been put in experimenting with lighting. The main template of the level is already done and i have enough quick models in my packages to scatter around the scene for rubbish & foliage. Lighting this scene has been extremely troublesome, Its never been clear to me how i would go about lighting this scene. My first instincts told me to focus on directional lighting coming across through the large windows placed around the side, using a technique with my alpha planes for glass i could create some interesting shadows along the floor, giving the sense of light direction and a really interesting result. This how ever was not as easy i thought. No matter what i did, my final builds always had extremely dark lighting. The only impressive result was the shadows baked on the floor. And the small bit of lighting coming from the large windows.   When I started building this scene i did at first think about creating the glass without an alpha but instead an emissive applied instead. This would create a glowing effect, the glass in the film shot is not particular transparent, its misty and dirty and the natural sunlight outside is making the window glow. I Have now transitioned to this method and i believe its working allot better. This how ever has now made me re strategise the  type of lights needed to my scene but i will get into this further below. Going back to the dark lighting i found out from some advice that it could be my lightmaps not correctly laid out or just horrendously applied. I found out about the texel shading and lightmap density view. I never understood what they were but now they make a whole lot of sense. Like the checker texture in Maya unreal demonstrates how well the lightmap UV’s worked. For all my work i have been using UDK’s Auto generate UV’s, i got rid of overlapping UV’s because I knew about the effect it would have but it turns out UDK is rubbish at generating second UV’s for lighting. When i found the texel and density view the grid was so poorly applied. Simple flat mesh like the floor was either stretched or squashed. So i had to relightmap every item I have back in Maya. This has now all been complete and reimported  Old Lighting, Alpha Windows With Directional Lights Change of lighting I got some great advice about the lighting for an indoor scene. It turns out the purpose of Lightmass is really for outdoor scenes. This may be a reason why I am struggling to light my scene appropriately. From here I'm going to continue building my scene with and without light mass and constantly compare between the both. Lightmass creates more complex shadowing, where as without lightmass shadows are going to be more harsh, this however will make build times a lot quicker. I recreated the window with an emissive texture as i mentioned earlier. With this UDK now has a feature where the emissive can be used an actual static light. Just by looking in the properties under lightmass and checking use emissive as static light. My world properties i had changed the bloom scale and emissive glow by 25%. This will create a stronger effect. My lighting has changed to more static lighting and a small amount of spotlights for sunlight direction from the window. The result are a lot better, I'm getting a lot more brightness and light blending than i did before. See images and compare yourself. I really want to create a volumetric style of light for the windows above, beams of light would give the player perspective of the main area, the area in the middle with the pods is the main walkway.  Demonstrating Lighting from emmsive, re-textured window World Properties  The use of the world properties is the link to the post processing console which determines how your scene is rendered, From here i have enable Depth Of Field, give a blur in the background. Also Have been playing around with Mid Tones and Saturation and shadow tones The Saturation values are key for my scene, as i said from the beginning this scene is will be greatly influenced by gears of war that uses a low saturation throughout the game to give that gloomy effect. I have followed this and i must admit it allows more light to come through and overall looks better.  New Lighting Next Weeks Task I did decided to quickly introduce the extensions of my scene, A reception area and a walk way. These are currently in Maya preparing to be lightmapped, the next couple of days this mesh will be texture fully and imported into UDK.  Thanks to Elliot and Nathan for advice

Week 5: God Ray Lighting Test, Block-Out to UDK and Asset Creation

Building on from last week I made a quick blockout of my level in UDK. The only use I had from my original blockout in Maya was the outershell. The outershell contains all the information I need, height, length and width, objects like the pillars have been built to the height of the shell, and if they need extending, well UDK has the power to scale objects without distorting anything. The most important area of this scene is the lighting. In the film you can see the large windows are the main elements of producing natural daylight. I tried to create this effect using God Rays, and changing colour of rays to a daylight blue colour. I believe this work's well for my scene but the lighting is not complete. Theres still alot of work to do inside both lighting, and asset creating.
It is all starting to come together now though and looking very interesting

Advanced Material Creation
When it came to the flooring of my scene I came across a big problem. Creating a seamless texture that cannot really be scene by the player as a repeatitive texture. I came across a fantastic technique that UDK has and that creating a texture from several different types of textures and tiling the blended textures random to give the overlay effect a random look creating what seems to be a seamless texture that constantly changes.

I will quickly walk you through how this texture is working. Imported is two different textures, the main one is the tiles which I put smears of mould on top. Second texture is a seamless texture of mould and stone. Third Texture (Reddish Coloured One) is a combination of 3 unique textures. Created in photo-shop, each colour channel has its own unique texture. This is so when using this RGB texture you can choose the effect of your overlay by selecting the colour channel of your RGB texture to the alpha of the Lerp node. 
Connecting the other two normal texture samples to A, B you will see the combination. Playing with the colour channel of the RGB texture will give different results.
To get my desired look I added a constant and multiply to increase the detail from my RGB texture.


To Improve this texture I will combine two specular maps from both the tiled texture and the texture in the RGB, followed by both normal maps from the same textures, combing these to lerps will give a much more in depth outcome.


Asset Creation
A new addition to my asset collection is the very distinctive Robotic Egg Handling Arm. These are another piece of main props for the scene. Several of these can be seen streaming all the way down the middle of the laboratory. I do need to make a few adjustments, like positioning of the arm different looking props. Would be a bad idea to have 4, 5 of these in a line all looking completely the same.