End of January Update

 Currently this week has been fairly slow, this is due to it being my birthday so I kind of knew I wasn't going to make loads of progress.

Saying this I changed my plan to only work on a few tweaks and small assets for this week. I've also worked out that if I can create 4 assets a week I should be able to populate the environment as much as I want.

First of all is the textures for the map table, these again were fairly simple as I already have most of these material presets saved and modified from other assets.

I do however want to work on the map itself a little, I'd like to add some extra colour, some oranges/yellows and add in an alpha map to add some slight transparency and frayed edges.

These are some of the smaller assets I worked on, a variety of crates and bottles to place around the environment.

These actually all use pretty much the same mesh, I then just created a variety of different diffuse textures. These include different colours but of course include some bottles with dust on top and some with dirt and grime. These actually turned out quite nice and it's little assets like these that will help tell the story of the environment.

Current update as of 29/01/15

As you can see here the environment is really starting to take shape. I tweaked the lighting and post-processing slightly to get some nice effects but also just started blocking in some trees.

For the trees I'll be using Speedtree, I've used this previously and found it to be really easy. However as it has been a little while I am slightly rusty and can't seem to get the trees to be affected by wind but I'll take a quick look on Youtube to remind myself.

This then allows there to be a slight bit of movement to the environment but adds in some nice dynamic shadows..

ExpoTees Selection Process - Proposal and Poster Presentation

Regarding an email sent out today it was said that the selection process starts today. I think my proposal and presentation are already in some other blog posts but to make it a little easier I've included the links to download and view them below:

Chris Rumsey FYP - Proposal (Oct 2014 - 794kb)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qrmr9lwfvguqydp/L1050085_Rumsey_Chris_Proposal.pdf?dl=0

Chris Rumsey FYP - Progress Review (Dec 2014 - 4.5mb)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oj2d64sz1qh2xvp/Chris%20Rumsey%20-%20Progress%20Review.pdf?dl=0

Small Assets

I've been doing a lot of the bigger work lately and in the evening I like to fill my time with some smaller projects. I try and pick a smaller asset every night to complete in order to get a big catalog of items into my environment.

The asset on the left is the candle with it's holder. I already went over the candle in another post. The holder however was really easy, I sculpted a little bit of detail in Mudbox and then baked all this detail down. The material was one I already modified and didn't need much tweaking other than some scratches on top of the sculpted detail.

The one on the right is a little more complex to explain so I'll go into further detail below.

From left to right: Original concept - Reference - My sketch

I wasn't too sure what to make of the asset in the concept. Is it the assassin's symbol? Is it a navigational tool? Is it usable? Is it an ornament? These are all the questions I asked myself. I decided to go the 50/50 route, I found some nice reference of an early 18th century backstaff and saw this mixed in really well with the Assassin's Creed logo.

I tend to do a quick sketch of everything before hand if I'm not 100% sure how it's going to go together but this one worked really well.

I added in some extra detail like the little dial numbers and the assassins logo etched onto the cylinder at the back, this was done in NDO, much easier than sculpting it in, in my opinion.

Latest view as of 23/01/15

In this revision I added in the assets mentioned as well as the beams at the top.

I've still got the ceiling texture to finish and revise the carpet as top priorities for Friday, maybe even chuck in an asset and some texturing.

I also fixed a couple errors with the blockout mesh as well, things like points around the window being moved and some verts that weren't welded leaking in sunlight.

I also just slightly dimmed the lighting, not 100% sure if I'm happy with that decision. 

Update: 23/01/15

Following some feedback I added in some extra sides to the object to try and avoid the faceted look at much as possible, I think this is a little bit better now and certainly due to it's size it won't be noticeable in-game.

Mid-week update - Jan 21st

I've really been making some progress these last couple of days and I feel they warrant an update.

The first big update is the second wooden floor texture, I ended up messing about with this one a lot but eventually ended up pretty much making it from scratch.

This is the finished diffuse result. I ended up merging two texture together and working from that. I really liked one texture I found from cgtextures.com however there was just too much lighting information and make it stupidly hard to try and get to tile. I ended up using a much more flat wood grain with the original texture overlayed on top (in grayscale). It created a nice result which I imported into Unreal and tiled from there.

I was also trying to explain my process for the wall/floor textures. I unwrap the walls/floors and attach a material ID to them in 3DS Max, therefore in Unreal I can create a standard material and apply it, this allows me to tile the texture as much as I want but also allow for minimal distortion when changing the walls/floors as all I have to do it re-peal it, not re-bake anything.

I also created one of my larger assets, the large chest of drawers. It was a simple straight forward process using a default dDo material and then editing it to my taste, I typically don't like the default materials but I find them a good base to start from.

I had a couple of issues with the handles not being metallic enough in engine so I used a quick solution of a mask and multiply node to increase the metalic value on them.

Finally for an added bit of detail I added some dust to the very top surface and added in a custom mask to show where the object has been brushed or where objects used to stand. I think this effect actually turned out quite well and I really love the dust material inside dDo,

At about 11pm after I finished the drawers I decided I fancied doing another asset, I figured picking something small would help my sleeping pattern! I ended up sculpting the candle asset in Mudbox, the results we're actually really nice and something I was proud of.

Next I had to decide how to retopologise this mesh which was currently at 365k tris. I took a risk and decided to learn Topogun on the fly, usually I wouldn't advise this but it turns out Topogun is ridiculously easy to learn and I finished my low-poly mesh in 30mins. Easy,

I then baked the high-poly onto the low-poly using x-normal. The result surprised me big time, it was hard to tell which model was which. For your knowledge the model on the left is 414 tris and the right is 365k tris. A huge different but a nice clean normal map can make a huge difference.

This is the latest view as of 21/1/15. It's really starting to take shape now, changes being new floor textures and a couple new assets. I ended up creating a few issues with the mesh around the windows but it can be easily fixed.

I just want to start breaking up some of the straight edges around the environment and start giving it a little more life. I'm not going to mess around with the lighting much at the moment until I have quite a few more assets in. Still hoping to get all the big ones out the way by the end of next week, but as it's my birthday that could be a big ask.

Large asset creation, material making and texturing

So far I've kept up with the schedule that I set out for myself however I've had to move a few things around after some feedback from Darren. These include:

- Modelling in the doors and walkway entrance
- Adding a backface to the walls/windows to improve my shadows
     - May lead to re-doing the lighting a little
- Improve on my rug
    - Got some advice to look at the rug example in one of the Unreal maps

Onto my actual progress, the map table itself has finished being modeled but I also wanted to go into how I created the design. Not only did I use the concept as reference I also looked at real-world examples (which there aren't many) to make it look like a real-world object.

I looked at a lot of 18th century drawing tables to see how they would be put together. I combined this with the concept art to create an object that looks like it has a straight forward purpose. I initially couldn't find many objects that looked like the concept so I ended up putting a couple together for the final result. 

The finished model, I tried to keep the overall look quite simple but I created the swirl designs on the side using a spline inside 3DS Max, these added just a nice bit of detail to the design but also break up the blocky-ness. I've added in a sub-divided plane for now for the map itself. The rest of the maps detail will be done using an alpha channel.

I've been trying to get away without doing too much sculpting, not because I don't like it but simply because it can be really time-consuming on such a large number of assets. I've found NDO to be a huge help in the project so far, I found a number of wood carving designs on the internet and manipulated these inside NDO to create some nice carvings which I can include on my normal maps.

You can see the same example here, for the grooves where the wood pieces would meet I created a PSD full of different shapes created using NDO, I can then use these where ever I want for added detail. I also sneaked in a very faint Assassin's Creed symbol into the wood.

If you've been following my progress you'll notice that I've been creating a lot of my own materials inside DDO itself. I use a mixture of creating my own from scratch and importing them in or completely changing the preset ones. The material above was originally a varnished cherry wood but I adapted it into a very rough and worn wood which will be used throughout my environment.

The current view of the environment as of 16th Jan. Here you can see I've textured a few more assets including the globe table. The table itself was quite hard as I had to get the UVs of the sphere perfect for my map would fit on there with a minimal amount of distortion.

There's also a large amount of wood materials so I'm trying to get them all to fit nicely with each other and not just awkwardly thrown together.

Quick Update (Crunch is about to begin) - Jan 13th

I didn't make a usual blog post on Friday due to ongoing work with another module, however I've just set out my plan for this week and also have a quick screenshot or two to show of current progress.

My current plan as follows this week is to get rid of some of the bigger tasks in my environment:

Tues:
- Unwrap globe table
- Unwrap map table

Wed:
- Texture globe table
- Texture map table

Thurs:
- High poly for stairs + side cupboards
- Texture these

Friday:
- Texture the remaining walls + floors

Sat:
- Overflow day

Sun:
- Rest

This should get me back on track after christmas and means I can then start the big crunch on asset creation and start populating the environment on a larger scale.

Engine lockdown:

I've also locked my engine down to 4.6.1, I was originally going to stick with 4.5.1 but I've updated to what the uni labs currently use to keep everything consistent.

Couldn't find an exact reference for this map table. However I found similarities in some 18th century drawing tables so I used this research to accurately create a table of this look from the time period.

Current view of the environment.