Week 7 - Large Update

Since week 6 I have added a substantial more amount of content into my FMP after critical reflection of my presentation last week.

Aspects that have been added -

(Organic)

- One blossom tree model & foliage instance
- One grass plane foliage instance
- One flower foliage instance
- New terrain textures

(Technical)

- One water wheel & house extension (animated)
- Two dragon statues (duplicated)
- Four fountain models (duplicated)
- Bridge 
- Second & Third tier of temple
- Outside terrace walks

(Removed)

- Main walk way up to the temple (player spawn)

Organic Modelling

Originally i was going to leave all organic modelling towards the end of my self made modelling deadline simply because I wanted everything to be white boxed and most organic modelling with alpha maps cant be added without colour.

The blossom tree is around 10K polygons. Which is fundamentally too high IF they were all single static meshes. However because I unwrapped the leaves and tree within the same UV and attached them as a single mesh with two different materials it allows me the possibility to add them as static mesh foliage instances. Which greatly increases performance and optimisation so the polygon count doesn't become irrelevant but defiantly matters less. The modelling of the tree was a standard z-brush process with nothing too complex. However it required a better understanding of how fibermesh worked and I now feel comfortable using the modifier to create foliage for large living organic meshes. I also learnt of a new modifier within max called optimisation. Optimisation drastically reduces the poly count much like Z-remsher in zbrush only you don't have the control through polypainting the desired place for high polygon or low polygon redistribution.



The grass plane model was the standard process of creating grass blade models within max, applying smoothing groups, turbo-smoothing and applying a gradient material. The reason this process is widely used is because when baking onto a plane you can choose any custom resolution, auto inputs a alpha map, bakes a normal map and also bakes dynamic shadowing through specular and light maps. The only downside is you don't get photorealstic texturing on the blades of grass post baking. However you can paint this onto the baked diffuse map after. But for my game in which photorealism does give anything it only takes away from the style so this method doesn't have any drawbacks.

I also followed the same method for the baking of the flower texture. By creating petals, rotating and mirroring them around a pivot point at 72 degree angles, modelling a cylinder and applying a FF3 modifier to bend in the direction I wished, I created the stem. I then used the grass models to create the leaves.



The material differs from materials added to technical modelling because you need to allow for dynamic lighting to be applied to both the side the normal is facing and the side its not. In other words you need to apply a subsurface lighting application into the blueprint. Along with this I needed to add wind animation to my foliage. Which is simple contrary to how complex it may sound at first. This is made easy due to unreal built in wind blueprint nodes. I followed a great tutorial on YouTube which made use of multiple vector parameters to control variation of wind, saturation and tint on the material which made the same blueprint applicable to multiple models.



The terrain textures are pictures I took my self with a DLSR camera. There were 3 variables I needed to consider when taking real life texture photos. The direction of light, the colour temperature of the day, how easily the photo can be made seamless. Along with this there was also the variation of distance, close, mid range and far away which can all be used in their own unique situations. This meant a total of 9 pictures of the same texture in order to find the perfect shot for my game. The reason i worried about the colour balance of the photo (temperature tint, e.g, red or blue tint) was so I didn't lose quality if I changed the saturation after the photo was taken. I would of taken RAW photos for even more graphical control but its not needed and more work to the workflow.  After the photoshoot was done I simply resized the photo and made the one i thought was most relevant to my game seamless. 

Its worth mentioning that I'm aware the photos might be to realistic for my artstyle however if this is the case its fairly easy to readjust the textures to look more hand drawn. 

Technical Modelling

The waterwheel was a basic model and even more basic to animate it. I wont go to in depth because its simply not necessary. The only part worth mentioning about the process here would be that finding a decent reference of a waterwheel that represented Chinese architecture was hard. All the references of Chinese water wheels looked very different from each other. So in order to make it fit my theme I applied it to a Chinese styled house on the side of it. 



The dragon model was also fairly simple. However there were a few aspects I did change and a couple more I would change if I had time to go over it again. For starters the model itself although it does look like a Chinese dragon, the statues outside of temples are alot more robust, and figuratively suggest the idea of a Chinese dragon unlike mine which is a literal representation of the mythical beast meaning its less authentically less believable in my environment which contrasts with the idea of creating an immersive environment.  Secondly the dragon was around 10K polygons which i thought at first was actually too low. Rethinking it this was a bad deduction and then I further reduced it to 5k, If this still proves too high i will try applying the optimisation tool i learnt previously that is built into max. 

I personally feel my ability within the software increasing. I'm much more comfortable and efficient in my workflow. This project so far has increased my knowledge through research tenfold compared to the passive learning environment of a class. There is alto more problem solving and intuition in creating an environment than i originally thought. Furthermore readdressing the problem of polycount within my FMP I believe within the last week I've made active decisions to solve this.

I should note that I've decided against a bamboo forest because it no matter how many times I revisit this idea I just cant find away or even picture it looking good within my environment. 



References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuY5WIaqdkg Blueprint Tutorial (for foliage mat) 

Notes

 - I have added the third and second layer to the temple. The reason this isn't of higher priority in the blog is because they are really just duplicates with abit of polygon trimming (around 40k) on each tier. There wasn't any major modelling issues or critical reflection that needed mentioning. However this is a large landmark for me to of completed. 

- I've drastically increased my focus on the outside terrain due to the feedback given on the presentation. 

- I've added some smaller buildings around the temple as you can see in the last picture 

- I've changed the cloud textures and animation speed on the sky box as Ian said it was too stormy

- Every single aspect in this project is now hand made or self referenced ( There are no outside placeholders in these pictures, textures, models or anything else).

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