Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Week 5 - Mid Week Update

Today I implemented my skybox into my Unreal Engine build. A skybox has the essential roll of creating the atmosphere of a game. It decides the emotion through pathetic fallacy, The art style through the realism of colours and textures, and governs time. 


Within a project that uses cel-shading you are almost immediately cut off from creating a skybox that boasts realism meaning you are already limited, or guided, depending on your outlook to creating a stylised and semi/full cartoon atmosphere. Thus with my custom sky box I decided to go with creating a highly saturated and multi coloured build. This will reflect in my environment as my desire is to create the texturing within my level to also be of equal saturation in colour. An example of a cel-shaded game on the market that does this well is a game called Dungeon Defenders. I believe their game is incredibly attractive and its because of its over saturated low polygon modelling that it achieves this. However a game such as Border Lands with its more realistic approach to texturing has a semi-realistic skybox. It ultimately depends on your vision. 

The very simple word for word guide of creating a custom made skybox within Unreal Engine 4 - 

Model a sphere - Cut it in half - Squash vertically - Unwrap - Relax the selection - Fit it to the box - Export as FBX. 

Find a seamless panoramic photo (I bought one so its licensing is legal) - Squash into a 2048 x 2048 square - Polar Coordinate so it becomes spherical - (I then applied a healing brush towards the seams to fix the image) - Save as TGA. 

Create a new file - access RGB layers - Select red - Add clouds (as they are seamless) - Draw realistic clouds ontop.

Select green - Add clouds - Add noise - Reduce levels so you get star effects -

Select blue - Create a sphere - Blur it 

In unreal - Create blue print, import textures - then follow the guide to creating the blueprints for an animation. I can't type this out as its extensive 

Here is the link to a pdf of a guide i used -> I highly reccomend. He was building this within UDK which is the platform before UE4. So some aspects such as the ASE exporting of a model doesn't work. FBX does however. 

https://juarez3d.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/tutorial_animated_skydome_v1-3.pdf

This is a snap shot of my custom made skybox within my UE4 project!


































Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Week 5

Week 5 has been a fairly relaxed week. There was no intensive research or amazingly difficult modelling. This was the week to create a mock up of my temple. This is so I'm able to have a working shape of my temple within my engine build to give a better sense of how the project is coming along. To re-organize the minds clutter. In principle the full mock up model looks clean and pretty. However its 150 thousand polygons. Which is a tremendous amount, so I'll have to cut down on the amount of polygons and also find a way to cull and LOD this building to not take away from its impact. 


The modelling process was fairly complex as stated in my previous post. Luckily due to the way Chinese culture builds a lot of the assets can be duplicated and placed. Also allowing for multiple objects to share identical UVs. This means I can limit the amount of draw calls to roughly 4 for each tier of the building. I would estimate for the entirety of the exterior I'll need roughly 15 draw calls. Which is a lot but compared to the possible amount in respect to how many models are within this mock up it could be peaking to 70. 

After creating the mockup, I applied the first tier (being the only fully complete one) into my engine to see what it looks like with the cel-shader applied. I used smoothing groups to eliminate outlines where I did not want them on my model applied by the cel-shader. This worked exactly how i planned it. 


Other than the implementation of my first tier I've played around with lesser aspects of my project. Such as the grass terrain, collision being added to the temple assets, the bamboo Forrest, so on and so forth. The key points to highlight here are that I still haven't worked out how to implement a low polygon and aesthetically pleasing bamboo forest. The grass texture is UE4's built in texture so I need to replace this, and I've removed normal maps on the terrain texture until I fully work out how to get it functional.

There are some possible Ideas floating around my head such as a lake in front that has large statues of Koi, Mythical beasts, fountains with water particle effects, water shaders etc. This is all for a later stage of development. 


















Thursday, October 25, 2018

Week Four Update!

From two weeks ago until now there has been no major changes to the project. Its been simple and straight forward progress with the modelling. I've created a few new models and implemented them within my unreal engine build. The most challenging aspect of modelling throughout the past two weeks was creating the roof of the temple. There's a saying that the Asian architecture is the most complex yet aesthetically simple way of building there is. This is an understatement. I thought that because it's 3D modelling and not replicating their builds in real life not having to slot beams together and calculate all the physics that it would be easy. It would just be building the same shape, however it turns out regardless of all those missing factors simply just replicating the shape is very challenging but extremely rewarding. 

This is the Temple build as it stands within a MAX file. I built the temple mock up within max because its easier to change variables rather than implementing it into unreal and trying to re-import every time.



So far I'm happy with the first floor layout. However this being a very early mock up there is many integral variations i want to implement into this build. For examples the left and right walls perpendicular to the front entrance will have buildings in-front of them. There will be a smaller replication of the ground floor attached to the ground floors roof. (Like layering, as seen in common temple photos). So on and so forth. This is a very rudimental mock up.

A photo of the build within Unreal Engine so far; 
















Thursday, October 11, 2018

Week Two - Mid Week

Mid Week Two - Update

After creating the first terrain texture, I added two more self made textures. One texture hand painted entirely, the second texture was air brushed on photoshop. The image was taken off google image, simplified to match my art style and then offset it to make it my own. It hardly resembles the original image not only to avoid copyright. (I'm sure this image is royalty free) but also to make it so i feel as if the project is mine, otherwise that defeats the purpose of creating my own environment. 

I found a landscape material blueprint from my previous projects and tweaked it to fit this one. I needed to change a few variables otherwise it doesn't work with my terrain size or with the custom made cel-shader. 

This is a snip from my in game build. The blueprint allows for layer blending between two + terrain textures. Currently I have 6 custom terrain skins in mind to blend or be separate. Ideally i would want the cobblestone texture not blending with the wood chip however when its not the texture contrast is too much and looks un-aesthetically pleasing. 

I wanted to add a height mask/dirt shade to allow for variance in the very obvious repeating textures. This will be added later if its required. 

I've tried applying a normal map to the terrain textures. Even adding a multiplier variable to increase the normal intensity but either terrain normal's aren't very effective or its not working within my blue print. This will need to be fixed at a later date. If i was to re-texture a terrain in the future I would start by checking my textures fitted the shade model first. I got lucky in the fact it does fit the cartoony lighting but next time I'm sure it wont be the same and will cost me precious time. 







(fig 2.) The terrain texture blueprint.










After I created the textures for the terrain I then went straight to modelling. Starting with a simple terrace walkway structure in the style of authentic Chinese culture. This was my first model in recreating their historic buildings. Over all the build went well. Managing to keep it fairly low poly. The only problem is that it slightly looks more Greek than Tibetan. This is mostly because the roof is pointed and not curved. To do this I would need to remodel however there where technical problems with my model so I'm scared to dabber with this model again. The technical problems where from exporting OBJ's, re-importing them into max until it eventually got corrupted and all the normals flipped. This was fixed by adding a normal modifier to the model and resetting all the normals which is a useful tool to know for later on. 














More critical reflection - Optimisation is key in my project. Its going to be incredibly high polygon which will take a toll on the FPS. So the first optimisation problem I occurred that i could of solved is that there is a lot of polygons within these two models in the picture above that could of been taken out because they simply cant be seen from the access the character has within the map. Within my next models before UV mapping (I mapped these before I had the thought so i couldn't re-edit them without doubling my time spent on the models)  I will remove these unnecessary polygons. 

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Week Two

Week Two

Terrain Textures & Cel-Shading


After creating the FMP proposal, I can now begin the modelling process. Originally I was going to use photo realistic textures and then air brush & photo process them to create similar lighting conditions on each texture, then use them to create a photo realistic environment. However on second thoughts this shows less skill and is relatively easy to produce. Instead I've decided to use the vector painting system within unreal & my own hand painted and generated seamless textures to create my terrain with. 

To start off this process I've began by creating a seamless wood chip texture. This is my process of how I've accomplished this to what i believe is a believable result. First off, I created a brush that resembled a wood chip. 

  


After creating this brush, it was relatively easy to then reproduce a texture from a reference by layering different sizes and colors of the stamped brush. This creates the illusion of depth as if wood chips lay beneath the others.























You can easily tell this is a seamless texture. However this texture is not of main focus and will be nearly out of sight. The ins and outs of perfecting it is not necessary. If from a distance can you still see the repeating texture then I will have to re-do it.

Cel-Shading

Cel-Shading is a way to create cartoony-look-a-like models through texture. It allows for an stlye to be applied within engine without recreating it through use of textures and 3rd party software. This increases work flow immensely and also creates an effective look art style. Within UE4 theres an advanced post-processing system built in. Cel-shading works with the post processing so it encompasses everything in the build. Meaning you have to create custom Cel-shading blueprints for the two tone shading effect. Like so - 


A basic rundown of this complex looking blueprint is that it takes the light rendering before its cast, limits it down to a simple if statement, and applies a colour tint to the light rendering. For example, if the light intensity is greater than whatever the boundary for a shadow value is, it condenses the range of light above it into a single shade with a colour tint you can choose to create a two coloured lighting system.

The black outline blue print, (the one on the left) is alot more complex and to explain but less important so I'll link my reference videos that explain instead and along with the paste bin for the blueprint of the outline shader that i copied.

https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/5dofdn8_/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UBNXneL1oo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQw1CL0xYBE

The effect is striking, quick and easy to use after the initial set up.The use of the technique was mainly inspired by games such as borderlands.




Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Week One - The Proposal

Week One - The Proposal

Week One of the FMP module has started. The opening lesson rotated around the 3rd years proposal of their FMP. Each person in turn, communicating their ideas and planning surrounding their visions of their largest project yet. After the basic introduction my tutor offered me feedback on my planning I did before the semester started. Overall, the feedback he gave me was positive with a drawbacks. The main aspect of which was the size to detail ratio my concepts displayed. He believed it to be too much to do in too little time time. Taking his feedback on board I've decided to downscale the size of my temple and strip away detail on the inside but keep the level of detail on the outside structures for the initial impact. 

Another idea my tutor suggested was to create a linear path through the starting point to the temple using light blocking out the surrounding world in a mountain pass/or bamboo forest (which is the most probable idea for me considering the theme). This limits the wasted time on the open ground terrain i currently have in my concepts that would of need not only a lot of time to fill in. But also a high amount of polygons and resources in an already detailed world.