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