Baking something good

I hope.

Overview of the Week

So this week has been one giant ball of stress for me. I'll admit, I wish my group members hadn't found out there was an extra week, because then they might have worked hard and fast to get their stuff done by the end of this week...like they were originally supposed too. However on the plus side it meant I could spend lots of time trying to learn lighting.

Monday was the first time I'd seen my team all together since well, Monday last week, and it was on Monday morning that a few of the team members finally gave me their assets to put into engine ready for the presentation, that morning.

We were critiqued, mostly on scale and positioning of a few assets, and on my textures (since they were the only ones in engine when we gave the presentation).

I'll talk about my textures later on.

Following the critique I spent some time going over the scale of the room, fixing things, adding in any assets I hadn't had time to add before the presentation. I also had to ask some people to separate out their FBX files as they'd given them to me as a group, which I couldn't place freely around the room, like I needed to. Specifically following feedback I skewed the chests position to make it look more naturally placed. Re-scaled the ornaments case and fridge and positioned them differently, and made the stairs wider. I also added new collision to the stairs using BPS boxes and a transparent material.

One of the team members was struggling with their workload so I took the wall from them and exported the walls and windows as separate fbx files in order to light the room. Separating them meant I could tick cast shadows off for the windows, whilst still having the walls cast shadows to get as close as possible to realistic lighting.

I then spent some time adjusting walls and their positioning and scale, then I exported just the walls and windows out as a newly scaled white-box for that team member to work from.

Whilst working on the room in engine I found errors with some models that people needed to fix, such as funky unwraps and overlapping Uvs in the lightmaps.

Anyway onto the main things I did this week which were Lighting and correcting the still camera angle. And fixing things.

Lighting and the Still

I had a lot of help from Craig getting started with the lighting. Initially I'd put a directional light in the scene to try and get the windows to light properly. However it wasn't lighting the room in a way that was even remotely close to the lighting in the still. Initially I had the directional light angled so that it lit the room to the first wall in the hallway. Which resulted in gross shadows and put the stairway part of the room in very dark shadow which I softened with a point light. I also used a point light to light the right wall in the hallway as having two directional lights in the scene wouldn’t work and the lighting in the hall is very subtle anyway.

I changed the direction of the light to try and fix the stairway being in dark shadow, but ended up with this:

However after playing around with the lights in the scene, Craig and I realised the light was actually passing straight through the walls, resulting in the radiator shadows being far too long and the floor being too well lit/too light. We fixed this by making the walls cast shadows 2 sided.

This fixed it but meant that our directional light no longer looked any good. So I turned the light intensity to 0 (to turn it off) and we tried using spotlights behind each window instead, since the room is a set, it’s very likely that we’d need to fake daylight anyway by using such an artificial method.

At first the spotlights didn’t seem to be on, but after turning them up to their highest intensity and changing them from stationary to static, my basic understanding of this is that stationary lights require uniquely unwrapped Uvs for distance field shadow maps, (in the same way lightmaps require unique Uvs), anyway changing it from stationary to static made the lighting better, which works for me. We then played around with inner and outer cone size until we got an effect that looked about right.

I also initially had three point lights in the lounge area to soften the lighting (with the directional light) but found that it washed my room out, and after feedback I deleted them and the room looked much better with only the spotlights in instead.

Before some changes were made:

After changes. This is my room lit so far:

Baking lighting showed some issues with light map resolution that needed to be fixed in engine (upped from 64 to 512 for the floor for example) so that the shadows looked softer and less blobby.

Before lightmap resoultion change:

After:

Once I started having to light the room on my own I decided the best thing to do would be to read some UE4 documentation.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/index.html

Then it was just a matter of playing around with settings and positioning of lights, and baking lighting to see how it looked. Which takes a very, very, long time.

The main things I played with were; spotlight positioning, source radius, shadow bias, min roughness , source length and light map resolution. Changing source radius really softened my shadows which was great:

I also put a sphere reflector capture in to brighten reflections without casting shadows (read info in unreal).

Plus I added a light-mass importance volume around the room to make building lighting faster, and a post process volume in to play with once the rooms lighting was finalised.

I also ended up placing some low intensity spotlights on the back wall to give that area a bit of light. I used the ceiling lights seen in the still to do this as realistically as I could. Plus I used point lights to soften the shadows in the kitchen area

Some other things I did with the lights was change the spotlight colour to a pale blue, and duplicated them to make the light more intense as it is in the still. I changed the colour by colour picking the light in photoshop, and using the rgb values for the light in engine.

I also changed the attenuation radius of the spotlights manually to 800 so that they reached over all the objects I wanted lit.

Here's the room before I changed the attentuation radius and positioning of the spotlights:

Finally I tried out some experimental things, which didn't work, but were worth learning anyway. I added a spotlight in with ‘—‘ unticked to try and give some overall ambient lighting and colour contrast to the scene. I also tried out adding in some atmospheric fog and a directional light (I was following a UE4 documentation tutorial). With the directional light selected I ticked atmospheric sun light to make it well, the sun, then set it to a warm sunny colour as an experiment to see how that changed the mood of the room. It didn’t work, but it's still useful to know how to light an environment using sunlight for future projects.

Here's the current hallway lit with a point light:

This is the lighting at the end of this week:

The Still

Lighting the room also pointed out some further issues with scaling that directly affected the stills accuracy.

The fixes I made were:

I went on to fix the left wall and move it back to leave more space between the armchair and the wall. I also ended up making the separator wall smaller and lower (so it doesn't touch the ceiling). I made the hall a bit narrower so the window doesn’t show up so much in the still, and I angled the back wall upwards so the far hallway wall is higher than the window wall on the left. I also ended up raising the height of some of the other walls, because I decided it would be quicker and more accurate for me to make the ceiling too. Since the stair wall needed raising up anyway. I made the ceiling on a slope, which was my best guess at how it would look. I decided that I'd rather have something that looks good but might not be 100% accurate, than try and warp the ceiling to be accurate but compromise quality.

Lining things up for the still took an eternity. I would screenshot from engine, then overaly it onto my still In photoshop, mark out what needed to be changed, change in engine, do the same thing again etc etc. I changed field of view, moved assets, scaled them (within reason), moved walls in and out. (my chair could be on more of a slant) but eventually I had to call it quits at ‘close enough’ since I think some things are a problem with perspective warping, and others are things to do with scale (game assets are always a bit bigger than real world) but also I think not knowing how the ceiling actually is as it’s a film set, has in turn affected walls and their positing, plus window position is a bit off, but it’s too late to change that, next time better planning earlier on would be..well..better.

Fixing things.

So the kitchen counter had a very warpy unwrap, and was coming up with the error 'overlapping UVS for lightmap' every time I baked lghting. So I decided to take the model and redo the light map for the person. However once I took it into max the model really bothered me, so I ended up unwrapping it too. Which on reflection I shouldn't have done, as it wasted valuable time for me. But the model had lots of hidden faces, parts not attached that should have been, n-gons etc. So I cleaned it up and re-did the light map. However when I exported it there were still errors with the map, but once I'd saved it onto my drive and exported again it was fine. I did also have to apply a flat material to it in Max which fixed my export problem too.

I also fixed the salt and pepper pots that had overlapping Uvs for the light map. Plus one of the models wasn't unwrapped properly despite being identical, and it had n-gons. Now I think there may be a bigger problem with the models themselves that means they keep skewing their own unwraps but that's something the person whose models they are will have to figure out. Re-doing these models at least fixed the problems I was having with errors when building lighting.

I also re-unwrapped the walls, floor and ceiling, but I haven't packed any of these models I've re-unwrapped (other than the lightmaps) as that's something the people who own the models can do.

I also rescaled and re-unwrapped the bedroom slider. Then made it two separate objects in engine,the door and the bar, so I could slide it closed when people were walking round the room (but have it open for the still).

This week I've imported a team members textures into engine, created the materials for them and renamed them all as they didn't stick to naming conventions. I've also gotten another team members textures and materials in (which I got them to sit and create themselves to save me some time), however I've had to heavily critique them all. But at least I have them in engine now, so if it comes down to it, I can make some changes to them myself. I also managed to get the glass material made (from that team members material that they walked me through) so now the windows can look more realistic, and I can start to finalise the lighting. They do still need to make them frosted glass though. The windows and walls still need to be multi-sub but I'm getting those in next week. I'm still waiting on the rest of the teams textures which is ridiculous. But there's only so much I can do.

Onto my individual work this week:

I decided to put aside a whole morning to fix my own textures, as I realised I need to start prioritizing my own work a bit more, as I'm not sacrificing the quality of my work for the whole group to get a decent grade.

I fixed all the seams on my armchair. Whilst fixing it I realised I could unwrap it even better, but I haven't got time for a fourth unwrap, so instead I'll just point out that I could have made some of my seams in even better places, such as making this seam:

Higher so that it fell in a more natural place. Mostly it was just tweaks like that that I'd make, to make the model even neater.

I did however update the unwrap to make the back of the seat cushion bigger, as I realised the reason there was such an obvious seam along the top was that the difference in resolution between the front and back of the cushion was too big.

Here's the updated unwrap:

I had a problem with the armchair last week where the albedo colours matched in photoshop, but I still had a weird dark seam going along the sides. I talked to Mike and he said it was probably a problem with the normals. Since I'd overlayed my corduroy texture onto my normal map it had affected the direction some of the normals were pointing in, therefore what I needed to do was turn my corduroy texture into a height map, make that it's own normal map, and overlay that onto my main normal map. I did this and it fixed the problem.

Here are the updated maps for my armchair (with a height map and surface detail normal added on)

I also made the cushion, pillow and armchair less shiny by making the roughness lighter for all of them. I still need to add the yellowy wear parts to my couch, and fix a few seams on the cushion, but I'm pushing that forward to week 6.

Here are the models so far in engine:

Meeting with Mike Kelly

We had a team meeting with Mike Kelly this week to try and sort things out. It reassured me to have some of the team members there taking on roles, however I'm still wary as to whether or not we'll get this room finished by Friday next week. Mike told us we should work from big to small, taking on the big roles and finishing them before moving onto the smaller stuff. I definitely agree. So that's what we've done. I've prioritized getting the walls, windows, ceiling and floor in first. Then the beams and big pieces of furniture, and then the rest. Luckily the people with the biggest assets to do were all present anyway. It's more a matter of trying to get the people with medium to small importance assets to get their textures in.

So onto reflecting on a) Last weeks Action plan, and b) my overall project performance, and what I could have done better.

Last Weeks Action Plan.

So I've managed to polish/refine some of my textures this week and work on lighting. Definitely not as much as I'd have liked to have done by now, but so many things that seem simple just take up so much time. I'll have to do the final analysis of the room in week 6, along with all my clean ups and getting stuff ready for hand in. It doesn't look like there'll be time to do the stretch goal which is a real shame. Something to do in a future project I suppose.

Action Plan for next week then:

• Finish refining my textures and get my models ready for hand in

• Prepare for hand in

• Write my project evaluation

• Get all textures into engine, but prioritize the bigger ones first

• Finalise lighting

• Do a group evaluation and final analysis of outcome

• Make walls and windows multisub

• Update textures already in to a better quality

• Do the Matinee and get room ready for hand in

So for my overall project performance, there's a lot I want to say, but I'll try and break it down.

I'm actually quite proud of myself for the way I've handled this project. I'm not normally someone that's good at keeping to deadlines, staying organised or skilled enough to churn out good work quickly, and whilst yes, my work could certainly be improved, I think for the amount of extra work I've had to do for this project, my outcomes have been of a reasonable standard. Especially as I've had other major stresses going on in my life at the moment, such as health and a recent personal event that has thrown me quite a bit.

If I were to do this project again, I'd be much stricter with planning in the early stages, and I'd work more efficiently from the get go. I'd have the blockout phase nailed down from the beginning to save me so much stress later on, and I'd have made a gant chart for my team and for myself so that we could have had more internal deadlines, as well as the main one, and then hopefully I could have kept people on track more effectively. I'd keep my files neater as I go and make sure that I always save before making any major changes, as I've shot myself in the foot with that one quite a lot this project. I'd also call more official team meetings and stress early on that we should all work in the same space as a team to be more efficient. However there is only so much I can do when working with others, and overall I think I handled it quite well.

There are definitely ways of working with engine that I could have fine-tuned earlier on to make certain tasks less stressful. I'd also have spent a bit more time on my own work as I neglected it a bit in order to get the room together. For example I'd like to have spent more time polishing off my actual models, unwraps and textures. Although, that being said, this project is the first one in which I've felt like I truly iterated on my models and made them better by going back and forth between the different stages. Especially with my armchair which is the best example of where I've done this.

So action points for improvement would be:

• Plan more thoroughly-gant charts for example

• Spend more time on my individual assets

• Finetune workflows to make things run more smoothly

• Keep a neater file structure and work space as I go along to make things less confusing

• Nail down the blockout phase before doing anything else

• More team meetings

Here's hoping I'll get this room done by hand in.