Sunday, 15 February 2015

These two weeks pretty much blurred into one so is a combination of two posts okay? I hope so.

Back to the project...we finally got a style guide sorted and the characters are beginning to be modelled! Wooooo! I'm pretty sure during every group meeting we've had, the 'we need to make an asset list' thing comes up...WE DID IT. It took long enough, but we got there.

Style guide
I've got the task of modelling/rigging/animating the White Rabbit which I'm actually super excited about. I've never rigged anything non-human so it should be challenging to say the least. At the beginning of week 20, I started concepting some costume ideas for the him.


I based the majority of his clothing on stereotypical items you'd find in the 1800s and because I did a character project on Jack the Ripper over the summer, it was super easy. I usually hate concepting with a passion but I actually really enjoyed it for once! Maybe it's 'cause I got to look at cute bunnies for 3 hours.

LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS

So cute. I asked the rest of my group which designs they liked best, and put them onto a separate document so I could iterate on them. By the end of Wednesday we still couldn't decide on one so I went ahead and started modelling the rabbit anyway, clothing can come later. Here's what he's looking like so far.
(Ignore the pivot. Oops.)
Something doesn't look quite right though and I'm not keen on the overall shape. So I've decided to go back to the drawing board and model the whole thing again. I also somehow managed to Turbosmooth him with 22 iterations and had to do a hard reboot. God knows how the hell I managed that.

I also went home for the weekend during week 20 and saw one of my favourite bands live, which was awesome, and then went to a Game of Thrones exhibition, which was also awesome. I got to sit in the Iron Throne and fall over whilst wearing an Oculus Rift. Fabulous. Well, I guess I'd better go and model more rabbits.
Week 20 & 21: Alice's Adventures Off The Map II
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Week 20 & 21: Alice's Adventures Off The Map II

Monday, 9 February 2015

To say this project was fun would be an understatement. I'd say this is the project I've enjoyed the most so far and we produced an awesome body of work. I was working with a really great team and we all seemed to get along fine for the most part.

Although we had issues with team members at certain points throughout the project, we all worked pretty well together and managed to get almost everything done that we'd set out to. However, this wasn't the only issue. I don't ever want to see BSP again. Nope. No thank you. It caused so many issues in the first week which meant that we had to rebuild the whole level to get anything to function.

Deferred decals are also a huge no. Due to the fact our level was tilted, they just wouldn't work at all. I think it took amber and I around 2-3 hours to get 5 placed. Ridiculous. Another mistake we've learnt from though - tilt everything last.


If I was going to do anything differently, it would be to be more adventurous with things. Maybe a little too broad there, but looking back, I feel that I could've done so much more. I'm happy with the assets, blueprints and particles that I produced, I just wish there was more of it. A lot of this project was about learning new things for me. For example, I've never used cascade before, so a good bit of time was spent watching tutorials and knowing how to create the desired effects we wanted.


I'm actually so pleased with the work we accomplished over the last four weeks. Yeah, there's still things wrong with it, but we've learnt from out mistakes - which is the main thing, right? For example, after receiving feedback from lecturers, we know now what parts need changing. We were told that the journey gets a little confusing once you've fallen down the hatch due to the purple fog. It was way too dense and no amount of bioluminescent mushrooms could solve this. We were also told that we really needed to nail the lighting, we were close to getting it right, but the whole point of this project was to create something with really atmospheric lighting and sadly, we didn't quite reach this target.

The bridge
Back area of bridge 
Airlock
Although, us being us, we had to have a few puns in there. My personal favourite was 'Nathan Crate'. Yes, we went there.


Week 19: Container City Post-Mortem
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Week 19: Container City Post-Mortem

Sunday, 8 February 2015

Yep. You guessed it. It's that time of year again which can only mean one thing; DMU are entering the OTM competition for the third year running!

Tuesday meant judgment day, we all found out what the project was really about, previous entries and the people we were going to be working with for the next 12 weeks. Luckily, I'm in a fairly balanced team with some pretty awesome people, so...no complaints from me! The GA team set us the task of creating a 3D side scroller game, which by the sounds of the debate, a lot of people hated. Ah well, I guess you can't please everyone. However, this was later changed and we're free do do whatever we want! Awwwww yiss. Anyway, back to the brief. There's three topics to choose from - Oxford, underground & the gardens. Of course, they can all be incorporated together, but there has to be a 'main theme' of sorts. There's also no texture or tri budget so we're free to go as crazy as we like...providing it runs.

I really need to make smaller moodboards. Argh.
This week was just spent figuring out what it was we wanted to do, research and a shed load of Pinterest. We haven't yet decided on a style which isn't an issue yet, but after meeting with Chris and Steve on Friday, we were told that by the middle of next week (11th Feb - ish) that we needed to have this sorted. Help. Everything is so pretty.

Storyboard of our initial idea

Towards the end of the week, I also helped out with some engine work and managed to get a couple working. More on that on next weeks post...
Week 19: Alice's Adventures Off The Map
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Week 19: Alice's Adventures Off The Map

Saturday, 7 February 2015


I think I mentioned something in the last post about Amber's PC being a bad egg and not letting us record anything? Well, here it is!
Week 18: Part II
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Week 18: Part II

Sunday, 1 February 2015

WE MADE IT. Friday 30th marked the deadline for this project and we actually managed to achieve almost everything we set out to do! Woo! Here's a few screenshots of how it's looking at the moment...



Monday and Tuesday were spent polishing the level and fixing up assets and textures to ensure everything was running smoothly in UE4. Monday was also the day all of us hit a brick wall and found it extremely difficult to finish any work whatsoever. I think the late nights and early mornings were really starting to burn us out.

We also went to the VFX Festival in London on Wednesday which set us back a bit as we had to set off at 5am but oh my lord was it worth it. 10/10 would recommend going. However, on Thursday we stayed in the labs until close again in order to get the final detail pass completed. I got all of my mushrooms placed in the storage room and the corridors which meant we were finally able to tilt the level. This caused a hell of a lot more issues than we thought. The main one being the floor fog. Oops. For some reason, it's not blending well at all with the floor or the crates anymore and we keep getting really harsh lines. Why do things like this always happen at the last minute?

Blending sucks.
On Friday we spent the whole day adding the finishing touches and panicking over decals. Amber and I spent ages trying to get them to work and look good, but this was proving incredibly difficult due to the angle of the rooms. ARGHHHHHH. We managed to get a few working, but they weren't able to be copied over to other sections due to the different rotations of corridors. Just as one problem is solved, another occurs. We've now got some weird issues with indirect lighting cause an odd orange mist. Brilliant.

Well, to end the post on a more positive note, we had a pretty awesome guest lecture on Friday morning! We had two former DMU students - Del Walker and Ben Keeling who now work at Sony - come in to speak to us about the work they produced at university, the work they're producing now and how they got to where they are. They also made an extremely good point of not staying up until ridiculous hours working on projects...which is pretty much what we've done on this project...but it does look awesome so it was worth it.

Week 18: Part I
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Week 18: Part I