My aim with the project was to set out to improve my knowledge and skill in 3D modeling, particularly around gaming development. I believe that I have achieved that by creating assets that were low poly but still detailed, baking materials to lower polycount, conducting tests in unreal engines, optimizing lighting and using instances to reduce materials coming into Unreal Engine. This is the first project where I created my own modular assets (I had used other people before) and it was great to keep polys low and pop up buildings very quickly. My favorite assets of the project were the neon gun, coffin and alley scene as I feel like they were created and textured well.
However, there were some aspects of my project I was disappointed with. About a week before the deadline one of my Unreal files with my Old Western environment broke, and although I had been backing up the assets I had not backed my unreal file up in a while. So I decided that because I was building a replica of the new saloon, I decided to finish it, duplicate it and then change the textures and assets back to the old scene. This would have worked however the new scene took longer than expected and the other scene suffered as a result. In a rush to film the video for submission I didn’t have time to pull in a lot of my hero assets, so the scene looks bare. I had also planned to texture the signs in a way that was they would look a lot better than they do, but due to the way I have the textures set up and need to make instances so these would scale properly, I didn’t have time to make proper decals and had to substitute the signs for 3D text from Maya. Although there are things I would improve in the new bar such as more assets, filling in the background, I feel like the Western scenes let the project down.
I also feel like I need to work on my confidence as a modeller as I would often overthink what I’m doing and some assets went through multiple revisions that now seem unnecessary and that likely held me back on timing. I also had covid badly during the assignment and lost 2-3 weeks of semester 2 which was difficult to reclaim after.
As the end-of-year show is coming up, I want to continue to develop my project and fill in the gaps of what is obviously missing from it at the moment. The project contains no atmospheric effects at the moment and I was hoping to add dust, smog, sand on the wind. Another glaring issue is the lack of world behind the buildings, as I did look for plug-ins or anything to substitute the plain background and lack of buildings but I ran out of time before I could.