Week 30 : Bright Gardens

This week has been another one of compiling textures and making the game look just about right.

Our group had a presentation early in the week which was extremely useful. We got to show off our level and talk about how we got to this point which was interesting. I'm surprised how much of the early formative things for this project I had completely forgotten we had done them so long ago. It was nice to see how our group had worked, which I think has been one of our greater successes this project.

We also got some good feedback which helps me move the project in the right direction. The main thing is that as we add colour to the project there was some risk that our level would become too bright and cluttered to the eye, over saturated. 

And as I put the brightly coloured Garden trees into the level I completely saw what they meant. I do however love how they look. It really makes the garden seem like a surreal fantasy place.

Though to stop the level looking to bright and crazy I did lower the saturation of the bright grasses. This luckily is easy to do in Unreal as you can alter each texture and its levels with ease. So when I have all the levels done I can spend a day or two just adjusting these to make the level look perfect.

Not everything is in yet, but the level is starting to look right. The trees and grass even sway slightly in the wind. The trees were a puzzle to make do this and I was proud of how I fixed it. Because they're a solid mesh not alphas I had to mask off areas of the texture to apply the wind effects to which I was certain wouldn't work. But low and behold it does! I have the wind very weak to not be distracting.

The other major thing I worked on for this week was sound. By adding ambient sound to the levels it will just make the world feel alive, I think. One of the difficulties I had was trying to find sounds for the underground rabbithole level that doesn't make it sound like a terrifying place. For the moment the sound effects I've been using have been either from Freesound.com or from the British Libraries Soundcloud which was filled with high quality sound just for this project.

Adding more specialized sound was far harder than the ambient audio. Half because actually finding and editing sounds to fit my vision was difficult, but also because implementing them in the level is far harder than I first thought. I've had several issues with getting sound to work right. And as usual for Unreal the fix was usually completely simple and just some easy option or solution I hadn't even considered.

Week 29 : Break out the paint brushes

Back from Easter and back to work. Work this week has comprised all of applying textures into the level. There's been lots of back and forth trying to get our textures to work just right.

As you can see our first pass wasn't good enough. The ground blended into the walls and had all kinds of muddy look. We also had some issues with UVs overlapping and some roughness glitches. With our art style being very cartoony using roughness and normals too much may look strange so we're being careful.

With some tweaking we've made it look far better. We're still in need of some splashes of colour to make it look somewhat less dull but it is coming along.

The main issue I'm having with applying these textures is that we have two texture artists both working at different rates. This means one may be finished while the other still is working which is why we have lots of blank textures so far. I really want to see everything textures atleast slightly so I can get a good feel for the colours and level. Inevitably we will have to send them back and change things it is always the case.

Being set in the forests and gardens of wonderland I really wanted to try out foliage. Unreal Engine 4 comes with a foliage system which seems very dynamic and efficient. It even has ways to work with the terrain mapping we used to use. After programming some wind into the grass to make it have some motion I tried out the inbuilt foliage systems. It definately needs some tweaking but I like how it looks while you play. The major issue I'm having is again waiting. These flowers and grasses look garish now but should fit when all of the level is painted up. I just have to wait really, work on as much as I can in between breaks.

The level is really coming alive with colour, starting to look more like our concept art. That I always think is a success. We're on the home stretch. Our more fantastical dreams with this project that we never expected to get too aren't too far now. I'm glad I sorted out all of the gameplay systems early because it lets us use this time just to make the game look perfect without having to worry too much about how it plays anymore.