Final Major Project [Post 13] ~ Pretty Glowy Things

 This week I have mainly just been finishing off everything and making sure everything looks good, I redid the walls in the hall to be more efficient, and made a new texture for the lower part of the walls. Every time I looked at the brickwork on the hall walls I just felt that it never really looked right, I was happy with the normal and specular but not the diffuse. I painted over my diffuse to make it less saturated and more of a brown colour rather than grey. This has made the room feel a lot warmer in my opinion and it compliments the new wallpaper in the seated area quite nicely. I am quite happy with this room now, but I feel that maybe it needs more things in it to make it less empty. 

I have been researching a lot about animating a glowy material for my logs and embers in the fireplaces and I finally found a solution. Most of the techniques I found previously, required a matinee animation and I thought that there must be a different way to do this, as I have seen animated materials before, but have never known how to create them. I want to prove that I can do other things, I already have a lot of matinee animations, and I want to learn new things. I finally figured out how to get the look I wanted without using matinee, but instead using sine nodes. It doesn't look exactly right, as all of the glowing is pulsating at the same time, but I am happy with it for the moment. If I have some extra time after completing everything else I want to do, I will look more into this. 



One of the big important things in my level is the stained glass window, projecting moonlight into the hall. I wrote about this on my project brief but couldn't get it to look right until now. I originally tried using a light that projected the stained glass texture onto the floor using the light function setting, this didn't look right at all and looked more like I had just put a decal on the floor. So I thought about it in a completely different way, instead all that I have done is made the window itself emissive, and put 3 lights, in each primary colour coming from the window with light shafts enabled. This has made a lovely and dramatic effect on the window and I am really happy with it.

I don't have a lot more to do in my level now, I literally just have a very small list of things to tidy up, I am very glad of this as I am tired of my level and just want to hand it in! I have bought some CD stickers and I'm actually quite excited to print out a nice design, stick it to a disc and burn all of my level onto the disc, I am quite proud of what I've achieved.

Final Major Project [Post 12] ~ Redesigned Rooms and Scary Portraits

Here is a video showing what my level currently looks like, it shows the working doors, new library key actions and more stealable things.

As I briefly mentioned in one of my past posts, I have been moving assets about to create more interesting layouts, the most noticeable are the sitting room and the library. I have added more chairs and rugs to the sitting room to make it more cosy and less empty feeling, I would like to experiment with the chairs some more to make them look more impressive, maybe play around with some normal maps. I have recently picked up a copy of NDO2 so this might be a good program to use for this sort of thing, but we shall see as I have never used it before. I will also add some mirrors to the walls in the sitting room as manor houses often did this to make the rooms look bigger. 

In the library I put more focus into the seating area, adding a chaise longue and moving some of the bookcases around. I changed some of the colours of the books as well to add more diversity. I don't think that there is much more to do in the library, I am quite happy with it as it is. Of course I have to work on the fireplace, but this is the case with all of the rooms and I will probably just reuse the same fireplace interior, I would like it to be filled with glowing embers/logs.
The study area just needs a few little tweaks, like I feel that the desk is too high, the bust should be somewhere else, but other than that and the addition of some paintings and a war newspaper, this area will be finished. I am very happy with the fretwork on the room dividers, it is only a simple alpha texture, but I feel that it gives more of a finished look to the room.

I worked a lot on the interior of the treasure room, I had previously ignored this room and concentrated more on the other rooms, but this is the finale of the level so it needed some work. I have reused a lot of the stealable assets that were dotted around the level, as a hint that "this is what you could have stolen" incase the player missed anything. 

This room is supposed to look very cluttered and abandoned, like the treasures have just been thrown in there and forgotten over the years. I might have a congratulations message come up on the screen when the player enters and maybe a twinkly treasure noise. However I think I mainly need to look at the colour scheme/lighting in this room as it is very bright and "in your face"!

I was a little concerned about the paintings throughout my level, currently I only have finished paintings in the dining room, and 2 paintings in the hall. Because of this I begrudgingly took some photos of myself dressed up and Photoshopped them to look less like me and more like paintings, I don't think that this is cheating as they are my own photos, I haven't taken them from the internet and I am admitting here that I didn't paint them myself. 

I did this to save time as my digital painting skills aren't great and it would have taken me days to properly paint a portrait from scratch, let alone a few portraits as I am not very quick with painting. 

Final Major Project [Post 11] ~ Working Locks and Melting Brains

I finally found a way to get my library door/key to work correctly, it took a lot of researching and random testing but it finally has the desired effect! Now the player can approach the library door, it wont open but will display [Door Locked] on screen, until the player gets the key. The key is in one of the drawers in the dining room that open when you get near. I had a problem here with the key in the drawer, if the player didn’t pick up the key once the drawer had been open and then closed again, the key would stay floating and clipping through the front of the drawer. I tried a few ways of fixing this but the more I did to it, the worse it got (key was now reappearing and floating in place when player had collected key, secondary key would not go away.) So I took a small break, watched a brain-melting episode of Jeremy Kyle and then came back to the problem, for some reason I managed to fix it straight away, its like all of a sudden it made sense to me.

It is very important to take breaks, I have always prided myself on my ability to not get overly stressed or weighed down with work and to take regular breaks, but recently I haven’t been doing this and my sanity is suffering because of it! Atleast I have realised now, so I can fix this problem with myself and have regular breaks!

In a way I am glad that I have come across UDK and Kismet problems at this stage in the project as once I fix them, I feel a sense of achievement and I still have a few weeks left so I’m not rushing or trying to find an easy fix, I’m taking my time and learning a great amount at the same time. I will admit that I am getting a bit stressed with my project but I think that’s only because I have done all of my building which is the main thing that I enjoy, so I’m feeling a bit fed up with this project now as I have to do more of the things I don’t enjoy so much. I feel like it’s too much time to be spending on one project, I would rather do smaller projects with less time and I even have a few ideas for other things I want to do, but I feel if I start other projects I will be cheating this one and this one is ultimately more important. So yes, I am getting fed up but at the same time I feel pressured to create an absolutely fantastic level as literally my whole degree rests on this project and that is very scary!

On another note, I keep getting a weird warning that shows every time I build the lighting on my level, two of my assets apparently have no triangles and I am incredibly confused as they show up completely fine in the level. This is another thing that I will have to fix.

Final Major Project [Post 10] ~ Post Presentation Feedback Fixes

I had one of my last presentations in front of my uni class the other day and I received a few pieces of feedback to help me with my level. One of the main things was that the Victorian wallpaper texture on the walls in the sitting room was too big and bold. I experimented with scaling it so that the pattern was smaller and more frequent, but it still didn’t look quite right. I had another look at my reference images and realised that most of the sitting rooms seem to be wallpapered with a simple tiling pattern or just painted a neutral colour like white or light blue. I used the plaster texture on the walls and then tried the wallpaper texture on the sofas and curtains instead. I feel that this looks much better, and with some additional paintings on the walls will provide the correct look and feel of the room.

A lot of my assets were the wrong size, such as the grandfather clock and dining room table, making the player look child size which I scarily didn’t notice before. (probably because of working on this same project for so long). I scaled them down and retextured some more of my assets; my level is really starting to come together now.

I have been experimenting with the stained glass window in the hall, but still cant get it to look right, this is an important feature of the level and is one of the first things that the player will see so it must look right. I have been moving a few of my assets around the rooms and experimenting with different layouts. I never made a final layout design for my rooms, just concepted the assets themselves and the size of the rooms. I feel that maybe I could have concepted the room layouts at the start of the project, but if I had done that then I would have just stuck with one layout and it may not have ended up looking very good. Atleast now that I have built and textured all of the assets (to the correct scale) that are supposed to be in each room, I can find the best room layout by just moving the assets around and testing in engine. By doing this, I have already found a better layout for the sitting room and the seated area in the library.

I managed to find a solution to the alpha problem that I was previously having with my plants, I had initially set the material to “BLEND_Translucent” and plugged the alpha map into the Opacity slot. However it seemed that setting the material to “BLEND_Masked” and plugging the alpha map into OpacityMask instead produced the desired effect. I’m not entirely sure why this is so different but atleast it works now, it wasn’t very difficult to solve and I know for future reference. 

Final Major Project [Post 9] ~ Quick UDK Update

Lately I have been very busy with unwrapping and texturing, I will admit that this isn’t one of my favourite things to do, but my level is gradually looking better with the more things that are textured correctly. 

I have been making the stealable assets this week also, but still would like to figure out how to make them look more obvious, like a sparkly outline around the items when the player gets close, so they know what they can and cant steal, alternatively doing this may be too cheesy and may not go with the look and feel of the level.

I have made a few potted plants to go around my level but am having problems with my alpha texture. For some reason the leaves that are behind are clipping through the leaves on the front, I am unsure how to fix this, I’m sure that it will probably just be a simple fix like a tick box but I haven’t found a solution yet.