Textured Personal Quarters Room-
During the latter half of our Easter break, I met with my group and discussed the progress of our work. The game design students had notified that the Monday we are back for classes will be the playtest build, and so I decided that for the animation students, we would aim to just get our submarine environments rooms importing and built into the Unreal project, not worrying about our props for the time being as I wanted to keep our work load manageable and balanced between the three of us. As a result, I got to work on texturing my Personal Quarters room that I had shown in an earlier blog post, just focusing on the walls and pipes for texturing. I looked at the detail work done on the Engine Room and base hallways done by my animation group members in order to match the style the best I could to avoid inconsistencies in our environment.
Below is a screenshot of my Personal quarters room, textured to match the other rooms currently done, my process including using height maps to create lines between the metal plating of the walls, along with rivets placed along each metal plate in a dynamic array for more detail. The same design scheme being used for the pipes lining the back wall.
Playtest Build Progress Update
At the time of writing this blog post, we are at the end of the Easter break and will be going back for classes tomorrow, along with our next class being for our playtest builds. At the current point in time, me and my fellow animation group members were prepared to import all of our room assets and textures into the Unreal project. I was going to add in my work first, however I ended up running into several issues where the merged file I was given had no lighting, in addition to constantly crashing on me at random intervals. After about an hour of work, I was only able to get 2 assets and 2 materials implemented. At this pace, I had the realisation that we weren’t going to be able to fully build our environment in time for the playtest build. So I’ve talked with my two animation members and we’ve agreed to get whatever else we need done, which we’ll show our lecturers on separate computers whilst the playtest build is going tomorrow.
Whilst I am not happy that we weren’t able to complete our work within reasonable expectations, this is the best course of action for us. Moving forward, I plan on getting my assets added into the project through using the university’s stronger computers during class tomorrow, and hopefully we’ll be able to have the environment mostly built by the time executives in the games design industry come to review our work.