This week, we found out Jamie had joined our group and with him brought some new and interesting ideas, such as we could do both light and dark themes by showing the fairy village at peace, then slowly deteriorating into an evil settlement showing the chaos and misfortune they bring.
Moving on into class, we sat down and followed some video tutorials that Henry had setup for the morning, showing us how to create landscapes in Unreal Engine 4. We had to make a small forest environment from scratch, learning how to use brushes to paint in foliage for a more realistic approach as we were able to control the size, density and whether or not what we were painting was varied or uniform. Today was my first day finding out how to make materials in Unreal and creating things like material layers, painting them onto the landscape and changing their roughness and specular properties with things called constants and landscape coordinates. I really enjoyed this activity, but unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of my environment as it was done on a pc in university. I tried to redo it at home, but i had to download assets off Quixel Bridge as i couldn’t access the files Henry gave us, but I didn’t like it as much so I didn’t fully finish it.
After lunch, we were put but into our groups to discuss our ideas further. We came up with a few roles to hand out and wrote everything down on a whiteboard that Amber kindly photo’d and uploaded to our Discord group for further reference. After this, we all presented some concepts we came up with over the week and used these to figure out more assets we’d need such as reeds and rocks for the pond, what size the mushrooms would be or how the hollow in the tree would work.
We decided how we wanted the environment to be laid out this week, with the tree staying in the middle, the lake was defined as a pond with lily pads and a lotus flower and we came up with the ideas of civilization where there would be ranks of common people, middle class fairies and noble fairies, each with their own area and species of mushrooms. To expand further on this, we were going to give the common people the area of ground at the bottom of the trunk, with common species of mushroom houses and mushrooms to display their rank, the middle class would have houses in slightly rarer mushrooms species and live higher up in the tree with decent living styles, and the nobles would live in the trees hollows with rare mushroom species and gems and jewellery stolen from the humans to show off their status.
We also talked about camera movement and angles for the cinematic and how it could work to show off our environment, adding in small details like a boat on the water to give signs of life and the contrast of the lives of the fairies with the danger of the ground at the bottom compared to the safety of the tree hollow.
We split off this week with the homework task of developing some concepts for our chosen roles to show the group next Monday.