Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

  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...

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 a...

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 importan...

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. ...

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.