Journal entry: week7

This week the Aftermath Project finally came together, and to be honest I am quite surprised at how well it turned out. Damon and I put in the finishing touches, taking turns in polishing the overall look.

Previously, we gave our lecturer a copy of our Project, and so this week he had created ground shaders, a sky dome and imported an ocean shader. From here I migrated the aspects that we desired into our master project file and checked to see if everything worked. All was well minus the ocean shader and a small issue with the moon in the skydome not working. For a while I felt quite confused why the ocean shader wasn't working, however after consulting our lecturer during class, he assured me that it had to do with migrating the blueprints and making sure they were in the correct place. As for the skydome, we were unable to figure out why the moon was not working, and so we simply removed the moon so that it did not affect the overall look. Once this issue was sorted, Damon and I had lots of fun adding in some trees, flowers and rocks from the Kite Demo Package in the UE4 Library. This package had incredible textures and so due to this, and the amount of flora we used, the first person play through lags slightly, however this is a small compromise. I also spent quite a bit of time finishing off the map edges by adding in rocks to make cliff edges, rather than have the map just abruptly stop and drop off, this was purely to make it a more 'playable' map. The last compositing aspect that was completed was replacing some of the particle effects with effects from a 'particle effect' package in the UE4 Library. These looked much better and so I migrated them into our project file and Damon replaced most of the fire, some smoke and some water particles.

After a few more tweaks to the lighting and finally baking the lighting (and after overcoming a few issues where the previously baked lights still showed up on the new bakes lights), Damon and I began to fix the camera movements to suit the final map. We didn't change much, just edited the timing slightly and made sure the camera wasn't walking into walls and such. Damon filmed a forest into scene which turned out really well i thought. Lastly we rendered the video out in 4K and brought it into After Effects to transition the shots.

We also spoke more with Dan during the week (our audio guy), and sent him through the final video which he could use to create the final audio.

Here are a series of pictures of our Aftermath Project:

This is the final video without sound.

I really like the way the light rays come through in certain parts of the map, and how the fog and smoke give it a really atmospheric look. If I had more time I would have liked to create more interior aspects so that it would be better as a game level, however with only 8 weeks Damon and I feel very happy with the turnout.

On a side note about the specialisation project, after talking with the lecturer, I explained my passion for Viking history, and he suggested photogrammetry. We discussed how I could use some objects that I have already made in real life, and take a series of photos of them, stitch them together using a program, and create a 3D object of it. We shall see how I go, I may try it out later on during the Trimester.