FMP 020: Out of the Woods

This blog post marks the end of my final major project. Before I talk about the project as a whole ill quickly mention that last few tasks of the project I completed throughout this final week.

As of last week Calum and I decided that everything that would be placed in engine would be done on the Friday, stretching that slightly I decided to model and texture two last assets.

The workflow of these two assets are just like any other asserts. Seeing is that this is my last blog post I go through it, one last time.

The first stage of my workflow for these two assets is gathering reference images to work from. Both the bomb and the Atari 2600 are real world objects, so looking for references of all angles wasn't so difficult. However, for the bomb which is more of a mismatch of items I did have to imagine for myself what certain angles of the mesh would look like.

The second stage is the modelling. This stage was relatively straight forward, the models are basically squares and a few cylinders. Now, for a larger asset or if I had more time I would have then modelled a high poly version to then bake down. Instead, I decided to use a max script that would simulate the process of baking down a high poly. I’m not sure if I mentioned this previously, but the max script of “average normal” basically takes a harsh edge and rounds it off as if there was more geometry to it.

Finally to finish things of with these assets I textures them in substance painter. As both assets had a few key images (e.g. text, logos) I had to use photoshop for the final few details.

Along with these assets I also organised all the files that would need to be handed in. Below are a few images I put together. These images are simply to show how we organised files, how we planned for the project and a few sketches at the start of the design process. I will go into more detail about this in my post mortem. The last thing I worked on during this final week was the flythrough of the level. This stage of the project didn’t go so well, not knowing how to actually create a fly through meant I had to do a bit of research. There are still a few problems, but as a whole I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with. Again, my next blog post will be my post mortem in which I will talk about the project as a whole, how I think we did, what we could have done better, etc.

(EDIT: So I've been putting together a fly through of the level today (Friday) and i can tell you for a fact this is the worst thing of the entire project. along with learning how to capture the flythrough in-engine I've also had to learn a whole new piece of software (Premiere Pro) in about a day. again, I'll probably talk more about this in my post mortem... sure hope I get graded on this)