On Fire

atomicartist42
Dec 20, 2015
6 min read

Working this week has been very difficult. It always seems so bizarre to me how the closer you get to a break, the less motivated you become to do work. I always think (and wish) it should be the other way around. You get closer to the break and start thinking 'okay this is it, final stretch, one last load of crazy work hours and I'm free to chill for a bit.' Don't get me wrong, I still manage to do a final push if it were. It's just always that extra bit harder when you're near the end.

Anyway enough complaining, the work needed to be done, and it got done, mostly. I wanted to aim for Friday as a deadline, because I knew that if I kept that mentality in mind, despite the fact it stressed me out majorly, it meant that I'd still kick myself into working feverishly to get everything done, and thus I could enjoy Christmas break all the more. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how much I've gotten done this week. Unfortunetely I didn't finish all the engine stuff like I'd wanted to, but that has always been a stretch goal anyway.

So Monday was spent finalising textures and getting some feedback on them. I've finally finished all my texturing (although I would have liked to polish it more in Photoshop), and have tried my best to respond to the feedback. The main feedback I got was; do height for the paint on the lamp as it looks a bit too flat, and make the wooden box look more realistic-as in give it joint edges to make it look like it's been constructed.

Something I also want to do is adjust the colour of the brass and copper, as the brass came out a bit pale in engine, and the copper came out a bit dark.

Here are my textures (with metalness, roughness and my alpha channel packed)

I had a bit of trouble working out how to do the emissive, as I couldn't have it as a seperate texture sheet due to the texture budget we've been given. Channel packing it also didn't work because it wouldn't show up as an emissive. In the end I used an emissive on the glass shader for the bulbs itself. Like so:

This doesn't cast light on surrounding objects though, so I fixed that by placing a light behind the bulbs.

Making a glass shader was relatively simple, although If I have time I'd like to play around with it a bit more and nail down my understanding of how exactly it works.

The next thing I started to work on was the fireball. That and blueprints are what took up the majority of my time this week. I'd been advised to do the fireball by having a ball of magma or similar as the centre of it, and then have a fire particle system surrounding it. So that's exactly what I did. I modelled a sphere as my projectile in max (this was the quick part) and put it into engine. I then followed this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enx6ShyKUL8 to make something akin to a glowing ball of fire/magma.

The really good thing about this tutorial is it's explained in detail along the way, so rather than blindly following a tutorial, I really felt like I was learning a lot about materials in Unreal. Understanding the tutorial allowed me to adjust it according to my own needs and problem solve. The biggest problem I had with this stage of the fireball was one with an annoyingly simple solution.

I followed the tutorial to a t (initially) and applied the material to my sphere, however rather than just having a roiling effect the sphere itself grew and shrank in size.

At first I couldn't work out why, but then after trying a default engine sphere (which was much bigger in size) I worked out the problem (with the help of a third year), since my sphere uses world displacement for it's tesselation, when it's too small it can't cope with the values I've put into the material and it grows and shrinks. However when I adjust the values to match the size of the sphere, it works. Like so:

(it roils in engine)

Here is the material for it:

So with the inside of my fireball done, I moved onto blueprints, as I was prioritising them above it.

And it's a good thing I did, because they gave me a bit of headache, and I doubt I would have worked out the problems as quickly had I not had help from a few third years who are good with blueprints.

I'll admit I got a bit confused by the pivot points part of this process. Not because I didn't know where to put them, but because I wanted to put them in places that kept my gun altogether when I put it in engine (I'm a little OCD about things being positioned perfectly, so re-poistioning components in engine was a tad stressful for me, but ah well).

I also had the issue of my gun pointing away from me when I walked towards it. Not very good for an enemy turret. However moving my gun to face me in Max before exporting fixed that problem.

The main problem came from trying to get my gun to fire projectiles at me.

I followed the steps to a t. Checked with other people, confirmed I'd done them right, but for some reason my gun wasn't shooting at me. The cartridges were being ejected just fine but the projectile wasn't. Because I'm stubborn I spent a lot of time trying to fix this one, by editing blueprints, looking at working gun blueprints etc. etc. however in the end I had to concede defeat and use the method Mike Picton had shown us on Monday to get the gun to fire by using an arrow helper. Like so:

The last thing I did this week then was create the fire particle system for my fireball.

I made this by looking at the default fire participle system in Unreal and then trying to re-create it. Doing this taught me a lot about particle systems, how they work, what each module does, what the difference between a module and emitter is etc. It allowed me to create my own fire particle system without eating into my time too drastically. In the future I'd certainly like to try and create my own materials for the effect but for now I used the engine ones and changed settings instead.

I also opted for blue/purple/green fire instead of generic orange fire. Partly because it makes the gun look more chemically based (which it is), partly because it fits the colour scheme, and partly because it just looks cool.

Changing the colour of the fireball sphere was a bit trickier, and I did it by using a material instance.

I was a little restricted by this as it only changed the colour according to the blackbodytemp settings, which meant purple was as close as I could get to blue/green, I'm sure if I had more time I could have worked out a way around this, but sadly, I didn't have more time.

All in all I'm quite proud of my fireball as I know they're notoriously difficult to do well. Ideally I'd like to have something affecting the actual sphere's size as it gets shot out, e.g. have it grow the closer it gets, but thats going to require a level of understanding that I don't quite have yet, and don't have the time to achieve, as I still have cartridge and muzzle particle systems to create, and promotional artwork to draw. As well as my own personal stretch goals of moving liquid and a force-field.

This week in Game production we covered channel packing, how to do the arrow helper thing, and I got shown a way to make my liquid move in engine, which I'll cover when I do it (and if I don't-it'll be in my Christmas Post).

In Critical Studies we went over analytical thinking and how it should be developing as we move up in the education system. I feel like I am approaching second year correctly after that lecture, as I've been trying to explore new tools and techniques with my work, and applying information in new ways or just trying to be gain a deeper understanding of what I do.

So onto the action plan for Christmas:

Create my Cartrdige Projectile Particle System
Create my muzzle flash particle System
Get my Liquid Moving
Create a force-field for the gun
Prepare my work for hand-in e.g. clean up the presentation of exisitng concepts
Polish Textures
Do Blueprints for the gun
Clean up Orthographics
Do a science illustration poster (promo artwork)
Do a beauty shot/high quality final concept
Do little warning posters-portal style as a stretch goal for the promotional artwork