Week 8 

After optimising my level better i can finally add more models and detail to the environment. The first step i wanted to cover before importing new models was the finalisation of the temple.

The temple has been an on going issue. The first problem was its polygon count, which I've managed to fix and reduce to 87K. The second issue I came across was that the temple was not welded at certain parts which mean light would break through the roof. It wasn't a solid build. To fix this i welded the corners and roofs together making it one solid piece. I then experimented with attaching the roof parts and the walls into one mesh, then duplicating it two times, re scaling and attaching them. Approaching the temple this way would mean i would only have to use one draw call of 4096 x 4096. This is a lot more efficient and would be ideal. 

The main problem with this was that the lighting of the temple within the engine wasn't building correctly. It  took a few hours of understanding how light maps work to fix this. Light maps are simply a separate UV that unreal automatically creates. It works much like the flattening map function within 3DS MAX in which it creates individual islands for every polygon within the UV. However with a model that has 80K polygons the Light map resolution would have to be roughly 8196 x 8196. Unreal only lets you create a light map resolution of 4096 x 4096. This meant i simply couldn't have a single mesh sharing one UV with such a polygon density. Thus i had to readjust how many models I split the temple into so unreal engine could build the lighting with no problems. 



After finishing the temple it was time to add more models to my scene to fill it out more. I started with walls surrounding the perimeter because I wasn't happy with the current set up. After researching traditional gates and towers that surround a historic Chinese temple I applied the most common recurring theme to my environment. The build it self wasn't complex and i managed to keep it relativity low polygon.



I then went on to create a shrine in which I could place the Buddha which in my original concept drawings would of been within the temple. But since the feedback i got given I decided to instead put it outside and work only on the outside environment. This meant creating a shrine in which it could be placed.



After this i went on to create fences that fit more to the theme than the bamboo originally did. I then also added a lake terrain box so it wasn't the standard terrain surrounding the temple grounds. This will allow me to add tiles or ground textures with custom normals, roughness, speculars so on and so forth achieving a higher quality finish than standard terrain could create. 



Lastly and most importantly I decided against using the outline blueprint within my environment. The main reason for this was that it was clashing with the ability to create dynamic lighting, god rays, volumetric fog and dynamic shadows. These 4 aspects are the reason unreal engine thrives graphically over unity. And since I chose unreal for its better graphical implementations I decided i should make use of them. Over all it has greatly increased the aesthetics of my environment and unless i can work out how to manipulate the blueprint to still allow for these graphical enhancements to occur i will not be going back. This also means that my original plan of having a high polygon count on technically implemented models was wasted and I could infact get away with greatly decreased poly counts on models such as the temple as there is no outline giving the suggestion of the polygon count anymore. This art style is more representative of games such as Zelda: Breath of the wild rather than my original inspiration of dungeon defenders.