Week 8

Run up to Alpha time! Busy, busy.
The worst part of this week was the little arches that go along the bannister up the stairs. I had no idea how I was supposed to go about this. Even look at ref images, there wasn't any photos of the steep parts on the bannister, mainly because it's in a part no one can really reach. But the fact I pretty much had to wing it didn't help.


I began by mirroring one arch so I had quite a lot lined up and then had to scale it on the Y slightly so it wouldn't be too short. After positioning it at the bottom, I selected the arch faces and separated them from the bottom poles. It was then just a case of rotating them to fit with the bannister.

After, I just had to rotate and place the poles so it would line up and I could re-attach them. I probably could have done this another way so it didn't look at bad and maybe there is an easier, quicker way to do so, but I couldn't really think of one at the time.

At least I had known that the stairs would take me a long time. Especially with the uving and lightmapping. But it was done and in Unreal. I brought an image of the stairs in to Photoshop and colour picked the steps so I could have that brilliant pink colour. It looks like that part of the stairs is some kind of plastic rather than carpet so I added a constant to sort out the specular value in Unreal and added a wooden texture on to the rest.

Next on the asset list was the column that breaks up the bookcases. Couldn't find too many reference images once again as there were either books in the way, or no one was interested. Using the lower and upper bookcases and the ceiling out of engine (Just for reference) I modelled the shape and the individual detail shapes before placing.
 
I made the decision to not bake these details down as when I tried it, the details were just lost and I personally thought it looked really bad, so I just kept the mesh as the poly count wasn't that high and those sort of things don't really matter any more. I originally didn't have polys on the back of this piece, but later on I realised light was passing through so I came back and added. 

Just for alpha, it was a case of putting a wooden material on that I would later change.










I admittedly forgot about the roof. Again using fbx exports from Unreal for scale reference,  it came out pretty quickly. But I had to decide what sort of details I was going to have on the roof.

Looking at the ref image on the left, it's incredibly detailed along with a stained glass window. I judged how much I had left to do (a lot) and whether I would be able to do something that detailed. For alpha I knew it wouldn't be achievable, so I decided to see what feedback I got first and then see if I would have time to create something more detailed. It's a shame I never got a chance or time to add more detail here but it can be something to aim for over the Christmas break. 

I did a quick search at gothic houses and saw that wooden rafters seemed kind of popular. So here is how the final roof came out. I have space for the stained glass window but I would achieve that through textures anyway.

Next came a flame particle that I wanted to use to light the scene. I used kismet in UDK to create fire before I kind of knew what I was doing. Even so I watched this quick tutorial on how to make a flame particle just so I would know what I was doing in Unreal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzg5g9ikds

When creating the final matinee, the god awful lens flare that came off the flame particle wasn't as extreme as it was in the alpha cinematic. By that point it was too late to change and even then I changed the lighting afterwards anyway. 

After placing around the flame particle

The flames weren't really doing their job properly but I didn't have much time to change as I needed to texture everything else.

I used the wooden texture from CG textures (ref below) on everything wooden, bookcases, stairs, bannisters, upstairs bookcases, columns. The tables just had a brown albedo with the AO on for the time being. the Lanterns had the same texture as the cauldrons as I thought that black metal looked ok and the downstairs windows had a translucent constant on as I was still trying to create the frosted glass effect.

The carpet upstairs (ref below) I edited to be blue and would later make a normal etc.

















GC texture wood ref - http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=19797&PHPSESSID=ud42de4lp1jq2sn38lr6s3rdm6

CG carpet ref - http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=8242&PHPSESSID=ud42de4lp1jq2sn38lr6s3rdm6



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