FMP 002: Working Hard or Hardly Working

End of week two.

As you may know, this is the first week of foliage. The plan is to complete the majority of the outside forest before I begin modelling the house. I spend the first day of this week looking up tutorials. As expected, foliage is one of the more difficult assets to get right in engine.

To get in the hang of being more organise, I decided to write down what I was able to accomplish every day of the week. Below is a day by list of these accomplishments throughout the week.

Monday: being my first actually day of work, I decided it would be best to set myself an asset list I could follow for the rest of the week. Using the reference I gathered when I visited San Francisco the previous week, I was able to put together a detailed list of several pieces of foliage to create. With a combination of primary and secondary research it definitely made the next couple of days modelling the assets much easier.

Tuesday – Thursday: these few days were reserved for modelling and texturing the first tree. Learning a new programme and watching tutorials on how to create convincing foliage took up most of my time. Once this stage was finished, creating the mesh was relatively straight forward. Again, using the reference images I had collected in person helped a lot. There were little to no problems during this stage. This was also the stage I started working on a whitbox for the level, thinking about where the assets could go.

Friday: the final day of this first week was spent making a few of the smaller assets and polishing off the tree that I made. When placing these assets in engine I had a few problem with the lighting and colour, at first what I tried to do to fix this was going back into the photoshop file and making the necessary changes. This worked, but it was a long winded process of trial and error. Not wanting to go through this process for all of the assets I created, I set up the materials in engine with sliders that could change the colour, subsurface intensity, roughness intensity, etc. on the fly. Definitely a time saver, and it gave me the reason to learn something new.

A quick summary of what I completed this week: I modelled and textured several assets (see list below) I also modelled a whitebox of the house I will begin in week 3. Lastly, I set up test lighting in engine.

• Tanoak tree

• Grass mesh

• Witch hazel tree

• Moss texture

• Sorrel (ground cover)

• Aralia

Overall, I’m quite impressed with the amount of work I was able to achieve in this (my) first week of practical work. Here’s a screenshot of the scene I put together (based loosely on a quick paintover i did) using the assets and texture I made and also a few assets and textures made by Calum.