Friday, April 27, 2018
Monday, April 23, 2018
Virtual Reality FMP Work
DOWNLOAD GAME HERE:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AviSwpNTB3aNlXeNvJ9IVs1uR1uX
Virtual Reality - Production Report
This unit has been a tremendous opportunity for us.
We were given the chance to openly work on a project of our choice.
This is the first time we worked on a VR project so there were many precautions we took and limitations we gave ourselves whilst pushing and expand the limits of our knowledge.
I with i could say all we did was based on talent but the only talent i can see is organisation and handwork and determinations through hostilities.
This much work wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for both of us working up to 14 hours at day.
Part of preparing for the industry as far as our understanding goes means, knowing how to work as a team, sharing the work as equality as possible, sticking to tight deadlines, and being ready to take heavy blows.
Losing the USB with a week's worth of work might not be much for some but for us meant losing at least 36 hours of work, that's a lot of models, re topology, and texturing.
We also faced another bump in the road when in the last week our project decided to work against us, putting us in a really tight corner, as we had finished the level 5 days before the deadline.
Unfortunately, when we came back to it the next day it was no longer working and we had to remake out changes from that week in only 1 day. The computers we worked on however corrupted the file and we faced the same problem the following the day again...and again until the day of the deadline, when not only we remake all that work a fourth time but we also recorded footage of all the progress we had made just in case the file got corrupted again and made several more copies which we also uploaded online.
And this leads me to my next important point which has saved us many times throughout the making of this level; and that is online builder Unity Engine provides as well as Facebook.
Using the Unity online builder allowed us to work on the level simultaneously and therefore no longer waiting for each other to upload new items.
This is how we dealt with local files getting corrupted, as we were able to save and backup the different stages of our work.
TASK ARRANGEMENT Technicalities.
When we started working on this project we were very hasty to distribute the work based on our strong points avoiding weak points such as I (Manuel) not knowing how to model in Maya or Daniel ever working on Zbrush.
It was after we lost the USB that I figured I had to learn how to use Maya in order to remake all the objects in time for the deadline, this allowed us not only to remake the items but also to make more in less time.
Same goes for Daniel, as him experimenting more with Zbrush improved the quality of the models by a long shot and made him faster with every model.
As unlike the other groups of 4 members our one was made of 2 we had to break out of our comfort zone and learn to work on every step of the pipeline.
This even meant learning coding when necessary.
Unreal engine is programmed to make game designing easy for the user, it provides all the environment elements an artist may need to make a level and same goes for coding, as making a function in Unreal engine is as easy as dragging dropping and connecting lines on a blue print.
However we used Unity, and to make functions unity we had to learn coding, in this case faster than i'd like to admit. But it meant we had pushed our limits and had taken risk and many step furthers than out competition.
But coding wasn't the end of our experimentation, like I mentioned earlier, we learnt every step of the pipeline so we could possibly match and surpass the work of 4 people.
So our next focus was on learning VFX, Post Processing Effects (which Unreal Engine would just automatically do), and Surrounding 3D Sound, with the aim of making the game more Immersive.
In terms of VFX we pushed ourselves to make things as Atmospheric Depth, Fake atmospheric Occlusion objects, Cold and Warm Temperature through the use limited lighting.
Which turned to be a big effort as VR did not support the type of lighting we had made in advanced so we had to optimise the game while replicating the mentioned effects.
As we aimed to make the game realistic and immersive we tried avoid all easy short-cutting and cut corners where we had no choice. So when making lights we created our own fire using Photoshop and animated it using uneven amount of frames so that the timing of the animation would look random. The furnace lights also glow at different intensities over time to further sell the idea of a dying fire.
we also animated the furnace fire and made the glow from it would overrule the other lights in the scene using linear lighting making objects near it more reflective than the ones near the torches.
We recorded also went outside to record out own wind sounds and different background noises.
As for the furnace it was as easy as burning newspaper and taking it to Audacity to enhance the echoing of the flames.
As I mentioned we made it so the player hears the sounds in 3D so the sounds will get louder and lower volume depending on where the player stands. the wind is also influenced by this mechanic so standing closer to the open environment will have the player hear the trees moving and the wind blowing through them.
The snow and fog took some time to make too.
For the snow we painted our own snow flakes on Photoshop and played with alphas to make it react differently to lighting in the game. As we first noticed the the snow was too shiny and lost believability. We made it so it would fall the ground ground in a way that the particles would appear to be responding to wind physics and made it stick to the ground for a few seconds to create the illusion of the flakes melting.
On the same topic we made the terrain based on the weather outside and for the player's comfort.
As we see it, the player would feel more at home if surrounded by warm assets and more intimidated by the weather conditions outside, further pushing the idea of having the player wanting to stay in out 3v3 area. We sold this idea with some more tricks such as making our own textures for the terrain.
We then made the terrain in a way that it would appear interacting with the player. for example the outside training area should theoretically be covered in snow like the rest of the level but it is cleaned and there are packs of snow that seem to have been pushed by someone. We also painted 4 different textures, snow, grass with melting snow, grass and grass with mud. So near the torches we painted a gradient of the 4 making it look as if snow near the torches would gradually melt. Of course no one asked this of us but this was one of our many ways of making the game more realistic.
We didn't want to just block off the area with 4 walls and not give an idea of where out character lives after including it in out character profile design sheet.
We also worked with anti aliasing and different camera lenses to make the game easier on the eye for the players and delay the inevitable sickness people get when playing VR for long period of time.
Making the sky took us a day and a half, it is a combination of painting photo-bashing and post processing effects in both Photoshop and Unity. I initially we had lots of trouble making it so the sky wouldn't be an obvious image but after several hours of experimentation, we found different ways of making a detailed flat sky surround our scene seamlessly, as well as lighting our scene in a realistic manner. Which leads me to my last point on lights and that is that the scene is completely and uniquely lit up with the fires the player sees and no other invisible lights, as we thought that keeping the scene fairly dark would sell the idea of medieval type scene.
OPTIMISING THE GAME FOR VR
We know the worst nightmare for a gamer is not a raid-boss with 3 heads but LAG.
We looked to optimise the game as much as possible but lowering the poly count to the very minimum possible even on complex objects and making op for the realism by taking them to ZBrush later and adding things such as creases and bumps to age the objects and give them some sort of 3D-mentional aspect to them.
We also made our own textures for every object, keeping each as detailed as we could since the low poly count of the objects would keep the game running smoothly.
SOME CONCLUSIVE PERSONAL THOUGHTS
We certainly learnt lots from the making of this FMP and to common disbelief this was our first time making a realistic level and therefor our first time experimenting with pushing the detail of meshes with textures over polygons.
Both our technical knowledge, patience and determination was really put to the test as the game went lost fart too many times due to hardware failure.
In previous projects we learnt to work with one another and we knew how properly plan and not overestimate out speed and energy to work.
So we had even after losing 2 week's worth we still managed to finish the project, testing at least 20 times, getting feedback from both teachers and other students.
We pushed ourselves to work against the clock, working for up to 14 hours a day and learning new brunches of our specialisation such as coding, lighting, and
Now that we have experiment with realistic modelling we plan to work with stilised models in out future projects projects.
Spider Diagram of Ideas Based on Character Profile
The photo reference received from teacher.
Part of preparing for the industry as far as our understanding goes means, knowing how to work as a team, sharing the work as equality as possible, sticking to tight deadlines, and being ready to take heavy blows.
Losing the USB with a week's worth of work might not be much for some but for us meant losing at least 36 hours of work, that's a lot of models, re topology, and texturing.
We also faced another bump in the road when in the last week our project decided to work against us, putting us in a really tight corner, as we had finished the level 5 days before the deadline.
Unfortunately, when we came back to it the next day it was no longer working and we had to remake out changes from that week in only 1 day. The computers we worked on however corrupted the file and we faced the same problem the following the day again...and again until the day of the deadline, when not only we remake all that work a fourth time but we also recorded footage of all the progress we had made just in case the file got corrupted again and made several more copies which we also uploaded online.
And this leads me to my next important point which has saved us many times throughout the making of this level; and that is online builder Unity Engine provides as well as Facebook.
Using the Unity online builder allowed us to work on the level simultaneously and therefore no longer waiting for each other to upload new items.
This is how we dealt with local files getting corrupted, as we were able to save and backup the different stages of our work.
TASK ARRANGEMENT Technicalities.
When we started working on this project we were very hasty to distribute the work based on our strong points avoiding weak points such as I (Manuel) not knowing how to model in Maya or Daniel ever working on Zbrush.
It was after we lost the USB that I figured I had to learn how to use Maya in order to remake all the objects in time for the deadline, this allowed us not only to remake the items but also to make more in less time.
Same goes for Daniel, as him experimenting more with Zbrush improved the quality of the models by a long shot and made him faster with every model.
As unlike the other groups of 4 members our one was made of 2 we had to break out of our comfort zone and learn to work on every step of the pipeline.
This even meant learning coding when necessary.
Unreal engine is programmed to make game designing easy for the user, it provides all the environment elements an artist may need to make a level and same goes for coding, as making a function in Unreal engine is as easy as dragging dropping and connecting lines on a blue print.
However we used Unity, and to make functions unity we had to learn coding, in this case faster than i'd like to admit. But it meant we had pushed our limits and had taken risk and many step furthers than out competition.
But coding wasn't the end of our experimentation, like I mentioned earlier, we learnt every step of the pipeline so we could possibly match and surpass the work of 4 people.
So our next focus was on learning VFX, Post Processing Effects (which Unreal Engine would just automatically do), and Surrounding 3D Sound, with the aim of making the game more Immersive.
In terms of VFX we pushed ourselves to make things as Atmospheric Depth, Fake atmospheric Occlusion objects, Cold and Warm Temperature through the use limited lighting.
Which turned to be a big effort as VR did not support the type of lighting we had made in advanced so we had to optimise the game while replicating the mentioned effects.
As we aimed to make the game realistic and immersive we tried avoid all easy short-cutting and cut corners where we had no choice. So when making lights we created our own fire using Photoshop and animated it using uneven amount of frames so that the timing of the animation would look random. The furnace lights also glow at different intensities over time to further sell the idea of a dying fire.
we also animated the furnace fire and made the glow from it would overrule the other lights in the scene using linear lighting making objects near it more reflective than the ones near the torches.
We recorded also went outside to record out own wind sounds and different background noises.
As for the furnace it was as easy as burning newspaper and taking it to Audacity to enhance the echoing of the flames.
As I mentioned we made it so the player hears the sounds in 3D so the sounds will get louder and lower volume depending on where the player stands. the wind is also influenced by this mechanic so standing closer to the open environment will have the player hear the trees moving and the wind blowing through them.
The snow and fog took some time to make too.
For the snow we painted our own snow flakes on Photoshop and played with alphas to make it react differently to lighting in the game. As we first noticed the the snow was too shiny and lost believability. We made it so it would fall the ground ground in a way that the particles would appear to be responding to wind physics and made it stick to the ground for a few seconds to create the illusion of the flakes melting.
On the same topic we made the terrain based on the weather outside and for the player's comfort.
As we see it, the player would feel more at home if surrounded by warm assets and more intimidated by the weather conditions outside, further pushing the idea of having the player wanting to stay in out 3v3 area. We sold this idea with some more tricks such as making our own textures for the terrain.
We then made the terrain in a way that it would appear interacting with the player. for example the outside training area should theoretically be covered in snow like the rest of the level but it is cleaned and there are packs of snow that seem to have been pushed by someone. We also painted 4 different textures, snow, grass with melting snow, grass and grass with mud. So near the torches we painted a gradient of the 4 making it look as if snow near the torches would gradually melt. Of course no one asked this of us but this was one of our many ways of making the game more realistic.
We didn't want to just block off the area with 4 walls and not give an idea of where out character lives after including it in out character profile design sheet.
We also worked with anti aliasing and different camera lenses to make the game easier on the eye for the players and delay the inevitable sickness people get when playing VR for long period of time.
Making the sky took us a day and a half, it is a combination of painting photo-bashing and post processing effects in both Photoshop and Unity. I initially we had lots of trouble making it so the sky wouldn't be an obvious image but after several hours of experimentation, we found different ways of making a detailed flat sky surround our scene seamlessly, as well as lighting our scene in a realistic manner. Which leads me to my last point on lights and that is that the scene is completely and uniquely lit up with the fires the player sees and no other invisible lights, as we thought that keeping the scene fairly dark would sell the idea of medieval type scene.
OPTIMISING THE GAME FOR VR
We know the worst nightmare for a gamer is not a raid-boss with 3 heads but LAG.
We looked to optimise the game as much as possible but lowering the poly count to the very minimum possible even on complex objects and making op for the realism by taking them to ZBrush later and adding things such as creases and bumps to age the objects and give them some sort of 3D-mentional aspect to them.
We also made our own textures for every object, keeping each as detailed as we could since the low poly count of the objects would keep the game running smoothly.
SOME CONCLUSIVE PERSONAL THOUGHTS
We certainly learnt lots from the making of this FMP and to common disbelief this was our first time making a realistic level and therefor our first time experimenting with pushing the detail of meshes with textures over polygons.
Both our technical knowledge, patience and determination was really put to the test as the game went lost fart too many times due to hardware failure.
In previous projects we learnt to work with one another and we knew how properly plan and not overestimate out speed and energy to work.
So we had even after losing 2 week's worth we still managed to finish the project, testing at least 20 times, getting feedback from both teachers and other students.
We pushed ourselves to work against the clock, working for up to 14 hours a day and learning new brunches of our specialisation such as coding, lighting, and
Now that we have experiment with realistic modelling we plan to work with stilised models in out future projects projects.
Inspect of some of main objects.
All Particle Effects.
Grab and Drop Script
3D Sound Test inside the game.
Screenshots of the progress of work.
Concept Arts for all objects
Planning of the new VR area.
USB Flash Drive Stolen
The memory stick with all the assets completed in week 1 have been stolen and after few hours of searching who might of taken it we gave up and decided to start over again. However we had to re-design our idea as we didn’t have enough time to proceed with our fundamental plan. This made our schedule really tight and limited the number of assets we were able to produce.
Timelaps of engravings on the sword.
Assets Finished in Week 1, as seen on the first photo there are assets such as box, anvil, desk and sword.
Visual Ideas
Spider Diagram of Ideas Based on Character Profile
Character Profile Worksheet
Basic Statistics
Name: Gregor
Age: 19
Nationality: English
Past, Present or Future: Student, Blacksmith helper, Knight
Socioeconomic Level as a child: Middle Class
Socioeconomic Level as an adult: Middle-Higher Class
Hometown: London
Current Residence: London
Occupation: Blacksmith helper
Income: Fathers Forge
Talents/Skills: Sword fighting, Archery, Smithing
Salary: Enough to Survive
Birth order: Youngest
Siblings (describe relationship): Only child
Spouse (describe relationship): None
Children (describe relationship): None
Grandparents (describe relationship): Grandfather is a f*cking legend, apparently, despite carrying a massive axe on his back, he killed a dragon with bare hands. He is now a beloved figure in the city. Gregor is fascinated with his grandfather’s achievements and he stays late after work hours to train sword fighting and archery as he wants to be like him.
Grandchildren (describe relationship): None
Significant Others (describe relationship): His dummy
Relationship skills: Great listener
Physical Characteristics
Height: 180 cm
Weight: 72 kg
Race: Human
Eye Coulor: Blue
Hair Coulor: Blonde
Glasses or contact lenses? No
Skin coulor: White (European)
Shape of Face: Dimond
Distinguishing features: He can handle falls from big heights
How does he/she dress? Rags
Mannerisms: Motivative, Heroic, Tryhard, Patreotic
Habits: Combat Training
Health: Young and Mighty
Hobbies: Pottery
Favourite Sayings: I swear, I can explain!
Speech patterns: L-le-let me focuszz
Disabilities: Big feet
Style (Elegant, shabby etc.): Creative
Greatest flaw: Scared of the forest
Best quality: Strong, precise.
Intellectual/Mental/Personality Attributes and Attitudes
Educational Background: Blacksmithing experience
Intelligence Level: Undiscovered
Any Mental Illnesses? Thinks he is better wizard than Gandalf
Learning Experiences: Blacksmithing experience and Self-Taught combat skills
Character’s short-term goals in life: Join the local army
Character’s long-term goals in life: Become a beloved character in the city
How does Character see himself/herself? As the Chosen one
How self-confident is the character? Very
Emotional Characteristics
Strengths/Weaknesses: Bad with finances and good at hunting.
Introvert or Extrovert? Extrovert
How does the character deal with anger? He takes his anger out on the dummies
With sadness? He does pottery
With conflict? He challenges it
With change? He embraces it
With loss? He blacksmithing to think
What does the character want out of life? To be like this grandfather
What would the character like to change in his/her life? To one day hold the axe the grandfather wielded in his days of glory
What motivates this character? Fame and glory
What makes this character happy? Looking at the snow
Is the character judgmental of others? No he only cares about himself and how he can improve
Is the character generous or stingy? Generous
Is the character generally polite or rude? Depending on the listener, he is very straight forward with his answers.
Character’s Role in the Game
(main character? hero? heroine? Romantic interest? etc.):
Hero.
The photo reference received from teacher.
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