Reflection

From looking back on my work in this assignment, I see how much my skills have developed in 3D modelling, texturing and planning a scene. I have also developed some new skills from this assignment like setting up a 3D environment and working with Unreal Engine. At first I found Unreal very confusing and difficult to use however after plenty of practice, class exercises and watching tutorial videos I soon became quite adept at using it and even found it very enjoyable. Now I love using Unreal and would enjoy building new and different 3D environments in the future. There were particular aspects in Unreal that I enjoyed more than others such as using particle systems to create fireflies. This was a simple process but I found it looked very good in my scene. Another thing in Unreal that I found enjoyable was using the foliage tool. This was incredibly helpful to me as I had a number of models that I wanted to use as foliage and being able to paint them on all at once with different densities was very useful. Even trying to build my lighting in Unreal was enjoyable. Even though it was confusing at first, I soon figured it out and was able to light every part of my scene just the way I wanted it. I was particularly happy with how I made the windows in the houses to be emissive and act as a light source. I also found the god rays and fog to be invaluable to the lighting in my scene as they really give the early morning atmosphere I wanted.

As for the models I created, I am very happy with them, especially the main tree and the mushroom house. Modelling the tree was quite difficult due to the many twisty roots and branches and having to make it hollow. This required a lot of extruding faces to get the right shape for everything. The mushroom house was difficult to UV map as I used Udims for it since I wanted to keep the door, windows, chimney and main mushroom all connected. For me to give them each a different texture I had to map their UV shells onto different tiles. This all worked really well in the end though as I love how they look in Unreal. Being able to change the colour of the houses within Unreal was very useful as it saved me from having to go back and make multiple texture sets of different colours.

Overall I am very very happy with my scene and I am looking forward to making more 3D environments and models in the future.