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.

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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...

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 importan...

Rooftop Project ~ Post 2

How the Level Was Made (Continued): I made a springy chicken ride that I wanted to be interactive; I struggled quite a lot with finding the correct thing to search Google for to make this work. All I want it to do is I want the base to stay stationary on the floor and the chicken to move on the spring when the player walks into it or tries to jump on it. I ended up using the InterativeFoliageActor which worked very well apart from the base also springed around all over the place through the floor, and the collision on the chicken had disappeared, so the player can just walk straight through it. I fixed this problem simply by deleting the base off the chicken mesh, and making a separate base with an invisible barrier collision going up through the chicken mesh. After doing some research on what playground items would be around In Tudor times I leant that the only fun past time they actually had was things like skittles and hoopla, so I added some skittles and a ball made of pigskin....

Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

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