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.