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