Room Project Evaluation

​​SMLXL

fear and loathing and loathing in Las Vegas - The Flamingo Hotel room

The room builds great contrast between the bright and pleasant colour palette consisting of calm pinks, whites, and soft natural light sources, to the twisted imagery of neon artificial light; the burning bed, flooded room (both of which would create some interesting visuals) and mismatch of props splattered chaotically, are all the great features for an interesting scene (see Fig 1: & 2). The rooms are open enough for the player not to feel claustrophobic yet not too sparse of props to be considered boring.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

District 9 - the shanty house/space ship

This scene holds two main themes that most mainstream gamers tend to enjoy: the rustic apocalyptic feel, and the neon sci-fi scene (see fig 3: &Fig2). The interior brings both human and alien cultures together so there's a wide array of props to showcase: from handmade lab equipment, and scrap to the neon screens, and consoles. Like the theme of both rooms, the lighting is also dynamic with the dusty natural light leaking through the windows, and the harsh glow of neon blue emitting from the consoles and L.E.D strips.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

True Detective - The Church

The church invokes the emotion of loneliness, deterioration, a main theme in popular in titles such as: "Last of us", (see Fig 5). The interior is wide and expansive giving the player space to roam, and although the scene is empty of intricate props, I feel that it uses this to highlight the atmosphere, and allows your eyes to drift to the walls and understand the buildings story from the paintings along the walls. The natural light sources highlight the main features in the scene, such as the crosses on the doors, and the cracks in the roof path your eyes up to the main focal point being the window.

Figure 5.

Your response to the chosen still

It was decided that “The Kingsman’s” pub “The Black Prince” was the best environment to replicate (see Fig 6). I feel that the still carries a great amount of character, fully capturing the British pub culture, and as it is just a generic pub, textures can be gathered from any of the numerous pubs scattered throughout Leicester which slightly resembles the surface properties.

The scene within the film is a fight sequence, containing wide shots, pans and close ups, which allows for easy reference, allowing us to stay as true to the film as possible. The scene has a deceitful cluster of props scattered around, at first glance it seems laborious to take on but a majority of props such as the chairs and tables have the same design, so only a small of amount of props are actually needed to be created, and then just duplicated around the scene.

The natural light sources act as a main focal point, assigning your view towards the most interesting part of the room, not only does this give opportunity for some nice lighting effects, but has curtains obscuring the outside so there’s no need to create an exterior to the scene. This is complimented by the dimmed moody artificial light sources scattered through the scene via lamps, which should be easy to replicate in engine.

Figure 6.

Your Prop Creation Methodology

A problem I occasionally encounter whilst modelling is understanding the asset’s proportions, but the preparation of a whitebox allowed me to have first-hand reference of our scene’s measurements and work of that.

Tri limits was another concern, occasionally I took my eye off the tri count which lead to painstakingly shed detail off a couple of assets, which not always mattered such as the bottle as the assets small enough not to attract too much attention, but my chair had to lose the arms which damaged the authenticity.

The lamp asset caused great frustration due to my unwillingness to leave the perspective view port, the arms were cylinders with a couple of 90 degree bends, creating this asset took me hours, from an angles I was working at the arms looked perfect but as soon as I changed perspective it was completely wrong. I decided to experiment and forced myself into the side viewport and was able to successfully model them with little problem.

Luckily the trickier assets primary elements I was tasked with could be duplicated, for example: the chair’s back rest was made from one edited cylinder and then duplicated, the same goes for its legs, and the lamps arms; this saved both time and meant the model’s structure was equally proportioned.

UV Layout and Texture Creation

Asset elements that had been duplicated allowed for a quick and efficient unwrapping process, an unwrapped object duplicated creates a copy of that version that is also unwrapped, so I used this method for elements such as the chair legs in order to shorted the unwrap process, and as the UV’s are automatically layered on top of each other there’s saved texture space as well.

As the scene’s wooden surfaces are fairly similar, I was able to replicate my wood texture across assets, and as all of them except one had a wooden surface, it allowed for a more streamline approach then I was expecting. Obviously I altered them accordingly for each asset; changes in tonal, hue, detail and normal maps, I hope gave an individual look for each one, for instance my dartboard had flat plywood feel, whereas my door was dented and scratched along the wood’s grain.

Unfortunatly I’ve never been great at texturing and this project is the first time I’ve created any material other than a basic diffuse map, so I had to spend time trying to understand PBR and the differences in maps and how the effect an asset’s material. Luckily “bitmap2meterial” provides simple and straightforward way to tackle this problem, and I surprised myself with some of the materials I was able to create.

Implementation of Prop Into UE4 Analysis of Team Work

Some of my groups assets didn’t correlate with the proportions of the whitebox we created, these issues couldn’t be fixed with equal scaling , resulting in some members having to take their assets back into 3dsMax and adjust the models as well as their UV’s. We couldn’t understand the reason behind this issue, but we came to the conclusion that they were working from an earlier version of whitebox.

I’m not sure why but certain models of mine had off-centered pivot points, no matter how many times I centred it and re-exported them, they always came back into engine with the same problem. I managed to solve the issue after creating a new export instead of overwriting the old one.

For some reason my asset files weren’t appearing in the group’s scene, after hours of trial and hours and shooting in the dark, I realised they were saved from a newer version of unreal from my home computer, this meant I had to painstakingly apply my textures manually and create new materials to all my assets.

An issue that affected me was that one of my assets relied on the shape and size of another, this being my wood panels. This asset skirted around the whitebox’s walls, and was built to fit exactly to the whitebox’s shape, but later on in the project there was a new wall structure fitted, which meant I needed to re-model the panels and fix the UVs. In conclusion I now understand how a slight adjustment to a scene can create a butterfly effect.

Reflection On Your project Performance and Developing Action Points For Improvement

I’m proud that my participation within the group was a lot more recognisable this year compared to last. I’ve tried my hardest to be as vocal and easy to contact as possible, as well as updating my group via “Facebook” through the processes of my asset creation.

This project has been less stressful then last year and seems to be a good sign for how I’m going to take this year on, and by sticking to my 9-5 work schedule it has allowed me to keep on top of my work and also keep a social life, this helped me from burning out, and losing motivation. The workload through this project has always stayed manageable and the organisation of our group meant we were never having to work throughout the night, stressing to complete the work last minute. The whole group finished their assets a week before the deadline, which left the last week to focus primarily on polishing up the scene, and working towards the stretch goals.

In reflection I would like to go back and use what I’ve learnt now about texture to put a little more love and care into them, such as cleaning up seams, maybe hand paint the roughness and normal maps instead of automatically generating them. Now I understand the process of baking detail in a low poly model, I would like to go back and revisit some of my assets to give them a little more character.

Evaluation of Final Image Submission

I’m impressed with the final render of our chosen still from engine, it has exceeded mine and my teams expectations, this is because the group managed to do an amazing job at capturing the look and feel of the room as well maintaining the art direction's photorealistic brief; I honestly believe it looks like a still out of the film, minus a few minor details.

A problem was raised when we as a whole realised that certain assets of the room weren't noticed during the planning stage, and this was only discovered when it was far too late to correct it, which resulted in certain assets missing, such as the high table and chairs in the fair right or the still, as well was the multi draught tap at the bar, luckily we managed to fix certain primary assets that went overlooked such as the shelf's behind the bar, even though they don't replicate the same shape I feel it's almost unnoticeable. This is a problem which needs fixing for any future projects, so an improvement of perception of an environment during the planning stage.

Another minor issue is that maybe the group should have kept communications just a tad more, to ensure that everyone is 100% updated and sure about what state the project is in at all times.

Team Manifesto

We chose to recreate the post-credits bar fight from Kingsman: The Secret Service because it was the most balanced scene we could find in terms of asset distribution, difficulty, lighting and mood. The still is simple, but effective in conveying a mood of subtle tension through camera angles and character body language, but the scene itself is fairly simple. Light coming through the windows in a ‘god ray’ style evokes a very different mood to what the scene implies, giving the impression of a warm, welcoming British pub.

The still we chose also allowed us to take full advantage of the fact that the pub was home to a fight scene, with the swooping camera and multiple angles used giving us a clear indication of space, as well as a view of all the assets we would need to make, meaning very little would need to be guesswork or left out.

The still also offered opportunities for us to practice creating many different kinds of surfaces and textures, with wallpapers, woods, plaster, glass and upholstery all available as materials we were able to recreate.

As a team we were required to evenly distribute out assets and make a work plan for the coming weeks, something we immediately established as soon as the project began. Our planning began by organising a Facebook group where we would establish meet-up times, progress, updates and general discussion of the project. We knew this would be essential to keep track of everything so this was a very early step.

Another early group organisation tactic was the asset list- we went through the stills we had of the scene, individually picking out assets and putting them into an excel document, where we would decide tri counts for each asset. While doing this, we also organised assets into a priority list based on size and importance. For example, the benches were going to be higher-poly models, finished and put into engine first before something like placemats. This allowed us to create the ‘feel’ of the room first and make sure that the scale was correct, as well as ensuring that if we stumbled during development the essential, room defining assets would be done in time. During this, we set up a time frame for what needed to be done and by when, aiming for the essentials to be completed by week four, ensuring a two week long polish, and giving ample time to deal with any inevitable road blocks.

During the project, our team would also lend our models to each other in order to keep a consistent scale for assets that sit closely together or work in tandem, such as chairs, benches and tables.

Bibliography

Figure 1. (1998) From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Directed by: Terry Gilliam. (Film still) America.

Figure 2. (1998) From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Directed by: Terry Gilliam. (Film still) America.

Figure 3. (2009) From District 9. Directed by: Neill Blomkamp. (Film still) South Africa.

Figure 4. 2009) From District 9. Directed by: Neill Blomkamp. (Film still) South Africa.

Figure 5. (2014) From True Detective. Directed by: Nic Pizzolatto. (Film Still) America

Figure 6. (2014) From The Kingsman. Directed by: Mathew Vaughn. (Film Still) United Kingdom.