Week 3 of University – Queen of the Dead continued and Conclusion

This week we seemed quite well on track with things and were doing well. It was just a matter of finishing assets and getting them in a scene in UE4.

I will just bullet point the major things that happened during the week since it’s easier and faster to read/ get through.

-         I modelled and started texturing the wallpaper and table, Having fun with roughness maps and the new PBR method

Games Console I created, spent way too long on this.

Table I created, loving the new roughness map in UE4

Floor and walls I made for the scene

  

-         I decided to start off the engine stuff and create a very small white box scene in UE4 to test out what our setup would look like.

Very rough whitebox in UE4 I made

-         Nearly all of our initial assets are finished and we have a finalized scene done by Thursday.

-         After that Ben took over the engine build and started to create the final scene from scratch while building all the lighting so there wouldn’t be any problems at the end.

-         At the end of Thursday Tamsin and Charlotte went home, but myself and Ben go over what needs changing in the scene to give it more life back to the drawing board. Baring in mind me have 3 days to pull this off.

The scene at the end of Thursday before we polished it.

-         We printed off a current scene and started drawing over it adding a lot of new assets to create a better scene.

-         We created a new asset list which consists of about 10+ assets that need to be created the next day.

-         Friday = Intense asset creating day, we managed to make 10+ assets between us and manage to create a really great looking scene

-         I was assigned to create a shelf and a bedroom door. They turned out very nice, I love the emissive I put on the door to simulate a light on outside the bedroom.

Bedroom Door I made, quite proud of it.

Shelf I created

-         We surprisingly managed to pull it off and created all the assets we needed, and we got them all in the build of our engine, Ben was tweaking his character and placing all of new assets in the engine.

-         Weekend comes, Ben does some polishing to the level and I finished texturing the shelf and put that in the engine with Ben, he creates some cool light effects that come out the TV and sorts out the composition for the level.

-         Project is finished and we were ready to present. SUCCESS!

Final scene in UE4

Queen of the Dead Post Mortem

Overall I think we were successful with the brief and had a different or unconventional idea with the project, and I think we managed to pull the concept off really well, I loved the character that Ben created, together with Charlottes toys and Tamsin’s throne it really brought the scene together.

We had a lot of humour in our level and it was a light hearted approach to the brief. The fact that we had a bad start but then picked it up with a great new idea was awesome, I guess there was some luck that we came across that idea and stuck with it in my opinion.

I also really liked that we were capable and managed to create about 10 assets in a day and really polish up the level, although if we created all of our assets quicker and got them done at the start of the 2^nd week we would have had a lot more time to think about polishing and pushing the scene to pack more of a punch.

I think one of the main criticisms was that we didn’t push the scene enough and emphasise the scary “King of the Dead” with the shadows and silhouettes of the character. The ending was a bit rushed since we only had the weekend to technically polish it and only Ben was working on the polish so we didn’t have much input during that time.

Due to us being so late with the polishing, some parts of the room looked a bit flat, it would have been nice to have some decals or more detailed textures on the wallpaper I did and some of Tamsin’s assets, just to bring them to live a bit more. The wallpaper is just a plain texture with a slap on random roughness texture on it, originally we had planned to have some wallpaper tears and crayons/scribbles on the walls.

Final scene zoomed out 

We could have emphasised the chair or throne a lot more by making it bigger and by creating a better shadow casted on it by the character, the devil horn shadow we wanted to incorporate from the headset didn’t show as well as we had hoped.

I spent too much time creating the console, which is barely shown or noticed in the final scene, I used 2 texture sheets for it which was a bit excessive, I just think it was a waste of time creating it that detailed and making a high poly model and baking that down. The emissive for it was a tad bit strong too although it was controlled and toned down in engine.

 Although I did learn quite a lot more about baking and became confident with it. It was a nice learning opportunity.

Some post processing effects would have been nice to give the room a glow or have some dust floating around the whole room, Ben created some cool panning textures to go in front of the TV but it wasn’t enough as it’s really subtle. 

The lighting in the level is alright, it sort of takes away from the character and washes out some of the chair and character but lighting is one of those things that needs a long time to perfect, again we just had a week to sort most of the lighting and polishing out.

Ben's Character for the project

Even though Ben’s character looked very nice, the skin looked a bit plastic and her eyes looked slightly dead one of the typical problems with video game characters. If we criticised each other more on our assets we would have been able to improve them and push them further.