When coming together as a group to decide on what environment we all wanted to work on together we had originally decided on doing just a simple toon styled tavern, with an artstyle similar to something like the Legend of Zelda: Wind waker game. We had also wanted to do something with the science lab idea and were deciding which one we would have liked more. As more ideas were given towards the science lab we leaned into it and decided to go for a kitchen science lab hybrid, as ideas were brought forward it seemed like it would be a fun project to work on. We wanted to create a sort of story with our environment, to show that something in the lab had gone wrong and was abandoned. We had made a rough list of assets that we were going to split between the group. I had chosen to do more 3D modelling as I wasn’t confident in my texturing skills enough for some of the foods and screen details.
We had decided to keep some theme from the toon style and go with an outlined shader with our project. I had experimented with a free shader package for Unreal Engine 5 but I couldn’t get it to just how we wanted, so I had watched a few youtube videos online to learn how to make my own outline shader for our project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UBNXneL1oo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZH4jCO4ZM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KvUfnrHcqM
I found these 3 videos helpful to understand how the material editor and materials in general worked in unreal engine 5. I had mainly followed the third video for my outline shader as I found the idea to have a lot more customization to my shader useful for our groups’ different scenes so everyone could have freedom for how they wanted it to look. We also decided we only wanted the outlines for this project when we swapped to the science lab so I avoided making cel shading.
Going through the project and making assets I found myself starting to get a loss for ideas on what to make for the environment. Around the start of the project when brainstorming what we wanted I could imagine what tools and other things would be around an environment like this. We had wanted to combine both kitchen tools and science tools but I couldn’t think of any unique ways to combine them when coming to actually making them, so I had stuck to making just assets that would just be around as decals, things like lights, plants, jars, broken wires etc. Most of the models I had created were quite simple so I didn’t have to spend much time trying to UV unwrap and texture the models that I had custom textures on.
Going into Unreal Engine 5 and creating my environment was a bumpy road for me and my group, we had issues importing eachothers assets and materials at first, some materials would have missing nodes or reset to a blank texture so each person had to individually help each other align what had gone where. We eventually had gotten everything fixed and went off to make our own environments. Throughout my environment creation I found Unreal Engine often freezing or crashing so I made sure to save every 10 minutes or so, to make sure I wouldn’t be reset too far. Oftentimes it would reset all my materials so I would have to re assign them to the objects they were originally on which had cost me some time. When coming to the end of my project and time to render, I had issues with rendering my scene, It would only appear black no matter what I had tried. After trying a few fixes online, My Unreal Engine 5 project had restarted my entire project and corrupted both my saves I had kept. I had to start over and do everything again although It hadn’t given me as much trouble on my second run through, I had to re assign all the material textures again but I now knew what I had to do for each of them. My second go through creating my environment went a lot smoother than my first, and my rendering was able to work without issues at the end. I feel like my camera work for rendering wasn’t the best I could have done and I wish I had planned out more about what I wanted my cameras to do and researched more about how to do good camera angles.
Throughout this project I learned that even if an idea seems good at first and would be fun to make, It should be taken into thought about how hard it might be to actually make. I feel like I had underestimated how difficult this group environment assignment was. Around the start I was able to imagine what I was going to want and what I wanted to make for my group but putting these ideas into reality was harder than I imagined. Looking back at the start of the project I would have wanted to lean more towards doing the tavern idea as I feel it would have been more simple and I would have been able to make more assets to contribute more. When having a block in ideas and not being able to create many big assets for the team led me to be confused if I was doing enough for my team at times, I felt like I was falling behind my group and being inconsistent on sharing assets. I have learned a good range of skills within Unreal Engine 5 and from my group members that i am sure will prove useful to me in my future life.