Rad-gate Park

Excuse the terrible pun, but visiting Brad-gate this week was incredibly helpful for me in creating the terrain textures, and in editing some of the existing terrain block out in engine. Whilst at Brad-gate I also considered learning Photogramettry. However learning a whole new process alongside all the things I'm learning for the project (considering pretty much everything I'm doing for this project is new ground) felt just a bit too overwhelming. So instead I decided to take some shots of some rocks that I could use for Photogramettry in the future, and focused instead on tileable textures and terrain (and lots and lots of blueprint work!).

We made the group plan more detailed this week, which was something I was pushing to happen, so I'm very pleased the tutor backed me up on this. We also added in weekly goals to keep everyone more focused throughout the week, and broke our asset list down into coloured benchmarks, so that it didn't come across as quite so overwhelming. We also decided to focus our energy mostly on the first clearing as our benchmark.

So the main feedback on the level itself was that it was a) too large, and b) that we needed to contain it somehow to prevent the player wandering off, and giving the illusion that it is a large forest rather than a few rows of trees.

What I did then was cut the whitebox down to this size:

This makes the transition between clearings shorter to hold the players interest, and also just generally brings the workload down to something far more manageable. I'd much rather have a smaller level thats executed beautifully. Than a sub par giant one, as always right? So we've changed the final clearing to be a flat stretch with a cliff to the left to mark the height difference between areas.

To contain the level we decided on using unique trees closest to the player, simpler trees in the second row, then really basic trees in the last row, then behind that would be a few tree planes, and finally a plane of a painted forest vista.

We'd also use large canopy trees closest to the player to block out patches of sky and make the forest seem denser and more believable.

I also decided that we'd make the cave by placing rocks around, rather than using a mesh. To do this we'd make about 3 different small, medium and large rocks, that are also unique on each side, that we then place around the level, rotating and changing as we see fit to make the walls look less uniform.

I blocked out and sculpted the levels terrain this week:

I also started to make the main grass tileable for the terrain using the textures collected from Bradgate, as well as making a simpler, place holder dirt texture, so I could plot the players path straight onto the terrain and do away with the white-boxed one.

I made the dirt texture using substance designer as it's a programme I've wanted to learn for a while.

Here it is:

Making this dirt tileable also meant I could learn how to blend textures on the landscape using the layer blend node for the landscape material, and by giving the paint layer in the landscape editor it's own type. I hope to learn more about this in the future.

This week I also started work on how to change the time of day from evening to night time and began work on the flying mechanic for the caves.

The flying mechanic was a lot trickier and I'm still working out fixes for it, so I'll post that up once I have it worked out fully and completed, along with the time of day change of course.

I also started work on a style guide and technical document. Well I say technical document, it's more of a master list of resources for me to use to improve my technical know how, and to help anyone in the team who also wants to learn a bit more about this stuff.

Also in critical studies this week we received a lot of good advice on style guides and development process. The main thing I took away from it though was the importance of a benchmark, so hopefully we'll have clearing 1 finished as soon as possible as a good indicator of our whole levels style and design!

Finally in regards to asset work, it's not a lot but I concepted and modelled the purple flower of love. I kept it quite simple, as to be honest, finding time to make assets alongside all the other work I have to do is pretty difficult, but I'm definitely going to make more time from now on, as I want physical products to show off at the end of this! As well as my technical contributions of course.

Here is my concept:

And here is the model so far:

Action Plan:

Mostly my action plans get decided in group meetings, but generally I've noticed I've become a bit lax recently in keeping on top of this blog and on what I do throughout the week. I want to be more focused with my tasks and keep on top of what I'm actually doing each day, rather than working, finishing, working finishing, without much effort made to document it, or else how will anyone know how much I'm doing!

The main things I want to complete next week are the terrain textures and the blueprints I started this week, as well as making the lantern since I've taken that asset over from another team member.