Final post

Final Cinematic:

And the link just for good measure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6jBNzBkAg

A few last thoughts

I know I lost a lot of detail with this project due to the scale of it and my doubts of my own skill. But I do intend on working on the scene even more. I want to work on the stairs and make them to be a real beauty assets that could be presented just by themselves.

Texturing is my weak point so I'd like to try and improve on those skills so I can polish the scene even more and not have it let down by the textures.

I'm glad with how much I learnt during this module, about how I work, my skills and limitations and workflows. Hopefully I can take what I've learnt and take it forward to game dev and future projects.

Here are some AO beauty shots because I prefer these:

Week 11

First this week I had the stairs open just to change some uvs, I had tile-able things on my mind so I thought I'd try it with the cross (as it was right in front of me) and it created quite a cool pattern. I noticed that my scene was lacking a lot in detail and one of the key things about gothic (to me anyway) is the high level and attention to detail. I did lose this scene slightly due to my lack of interest in the brief and my self doubt that I could pull it off. As I was running out of time to get any kind of major detailing done, I thought this would at least help to pull my scene back towards gothic so it would still be about the brief.



















So, I put it everywhere.

 This is just with an Unreal material just so I could see how it looked and in the end I think it really helped pull the scene together. I did originally bake it down as the poly count was a lot, but the bake just looked awful so I kept it as I thought this detail was worth it.

The end walls have the trim downstairs.

Now I felt like the scene was coming together, I thought about what else I could add for dynamics. Kyle Moody suggested back in week 3 I could have banners swaying so I went with that.

After making the basic shape, I was unsure of how to make it sway. After watching Kyle Horwood (so many Kyles!) make his trees for his moorish scene, I thought it would be best to use vertex colouring to make the banners sway slightly. Using this tutorial https://vimeo.com/album/3156615/video/98373299 I managed to get the basics down and paint the banner in Maya (right).

When creating the material, it was such a learning jump for me as I learned quite a bit about the different nodes.

 Looking at a UE4 material that glows, I managed to re-produce an emissive that glows on and off through an alpha. I had a bit of help with the world position offset part but we managed to make it so the banner sways slightly off the bannisters. It may not be that visible in the cinematic but I know it's there and when you do catch it, it adds to the scenes feel.

Even though I decided to take this out, I made another glowing material for some bottles I planned to have around the scene. I was struggling with making a believable glass texture for the bottles and thought it might look ok if I had this instead.

The bottle would glow between the light pink and the dark purple. I also added the clouds from the crystal ball in to the base colour to give it a bit of substance.

I added a few more final things just to add that little bit extra.

Ladder! Even though the wizard who owns the place doesn't need a ladder and can just use his magic for get anything he needs from the other side of the shop. But it's another prop.









I also made a little stool for when he's tired of being magical and wishes to rest like a regular person.

















As a very last minutes thing, I also made a few of the books float from one bookcase to another in matinee.

Particles & Effects

Whilst thinking of things to fill up the scene, I thought of using particles to make the scene more dynamic from the feedback I was given from alpha. After I had deleted the lens flare flame particle, began just playing around with different options in Cascade with a blue circle alpha I made in Photoshop.

I have the particle in engine selected on the left so you can kind of see that they're floating all over the shop and there is a closer shot on the right. I didn't it to be too over powering like a blizzard so I think this is a good amount to give off a magical feel.

I had a lot of fun making the particles so now that I didn't really have much use for the lanterns, I thought it might look cool if I made some particles to represent elemental magic. Yellow is light, the snowflakes are ice (duh), red is fire, purple is spirit and green is earth. I created a quick matinee so the lanterns would be floating slightly but it didn't look that great. These are placed above the upstairs bookcases.

Next I made a little bubble particle to emit from some of the cauldrons.

There was a bit of an issue that the particle emmiter was too wide so the bubbles would go through the side of the cauldron, but Kyle showed me how to change that.

I like how it looks, it's cute.