The Golden Line: Production Week 5: The Final Stretch

Our deadline is looming ever closer. Going from 12 weeks, we spent 2 on developing the art bible leaving 10 weeks of production time. Our fifth week on production we aimed as a group to get as much of the ocean view complete or ''working on'' as possible. This is mostly done now and needs placing in the scene, after this we begin to split into groups to work on the generator, elevator rooms and finish the balcony simultaneously. We have had some great feedback towards fine tuning our work this week from Escape Studios tutor Christian Avigni as well as some extra feedback on VFX from Tom Harle.

We now have bubbles, fish and kelp moving in the background of our ocean view!

Hannah

To get our team re-focused once again Viktor and I went through our asset list to trim down anything unnecessary and give a really clear view of what each person had to do and how many days of work that was vs how many days we actually have. This meant shuffling around a lot of work. Whilst we re-planned I did a very quick photo bash to help give the idea of how the ocean view should be laid out to aid composition and general layout, this helped visualise what we really needed to make the scene look alive and make sure we didn't forget things off the asset list.

Using iconic buildings and an indication of ocean life and vfx

Kelp.

I was hoping I could squeeze this onto my previous foliage UV but there wasn't enough space for something that will become possibly quite prevalent through the scene so variety was key. The kelp therefore has its own UV and texture files.

Testing how kelp looks in test scene at home and in comparison to other foliage

Ocean Critters

I made some starfish for our windows, as Bioshock is known to have starfish sporadically over the windows. I made two variants and again trying to make the most of my UV's I decided to add some barnacles which can be added to the outside structures or hidden in wet areas in our scene like the elevator room.

Testing my starfish and barnacles in my test scene at home

Tweaks and Tiles

Additionally I took this week to clean up some odds and ends of my contributions so far, double checking file sizes were appropriate and I finally fixed the alpha on the clock! I received some feedback on my tile texture, which I had hoped was finally dead! But with a few more tweaks its looking a bit more natural now, it was also discussed that perhaps the broken look I was going for would be better done with decals. As Viktor was working on the floor we discussed this and because the tiles are used throughout a lot of our scene if we used a combination of vertex painting AND decals we could maximise the variety of the floor.

Giulia

During this past week I've been working on the rubble piles set for the collapsed balcony area and on the rocks that form the cliff outside our main hall.

Rubble
I was able to create individual concrete pieces, rubble piles, pebbles and a base material based on this set found online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGtV3m9uY4o). Next week I will be building the actual piles in the scene, and when it's finally done I will describe the whole process.

Rubble material to be placed under main meshes

Rubble meshes

Rocks
For the rocks in our scene I chose to rework two simple rocks that I made a few months back for a diorama project (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1nN5Z3). Most of the details in the two assets have been manually sculpted in Zbrush using the Trim Smooth Border Brush, the Mallet Fast Brush and a few rock alphas available on the Pixologic website.

I've made two versions of each one because I want to be sure that the bigger rocks will have enough geometry to allow me to vertex paint some moss on top of it. I've also created a procedural moss material following this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK_jA-pIfeI and tested it on one of the two rocks.

PG

This week I was working on making a jelly fish and animating those using shaders as they are cheaper to process then skeleton weights. Since there wasn’t anything new to learn I didn’t have too much trouble making them. After that I was working on a simple bubble plane so that we can use them in the ocean area. This will help clear out some of the empty volume we have and it gives the impression that the ocean is actually made of water. After I had a decent looking bubble plane I started rigging a whale which one of my team mates had made so that I can animate it. Rigging a whale wasn’t too much of an issue as its quiet a simple creature. Animating was a bit more difficult but once I figured out how a whale swims I was able to create a decent looking whale animation. I threw together a simple blueprint that makes the jellyfish and whale run along a spline which made the scene look very lively.

Joel

This week I was given the task of learning about vertex painting puddles. The majority of the week was learning how I could paint on materials and blueprinting.

Test

I first wanted to gain a basic understanding of vertex painting in different channels. At first I found it difficult as I tried to use the alpha channel but for some reason it wasn't working. I learnt if I use the paint tool and use all three channels it blends the paint.

Puddle

After gaining a good understanding of vertex painting with channel I then went online for a tutorial for making puddles. I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8D8Vnskm6E by steven's tutorials. I used his instructions as a guide to produce the puddles as seen in below.

Moss

When I made the puddle i tried to add another thing to the channel that had a bit more detail. Since our environment was underwater i thought of using moss. I tried to see if i could give it its own normal and roughness in the same material. As seen in image below, I tried to make moss as well but it needs more fine detail.

Goals for next week

After receiving feed back from the group i'm going to experiment with heightmaps. this will allow the puddle or to fill in cracks for a more realistic look. I also want to start making a high pressure steam particle effect.

Viktor

As I've mentioned in last week's post, I was working on a door for the scene. As of this week it has been finished and textured in Substance Painter. I'm quite happy with the details on it. I have used ID maps to aid the texturing process, makes everything so much easier.

Finished door

ID map

St Pauls
After the door is finished, I've started to work on building St Paul's cathedral for the outside to populate the scene even more. It's in very early stages still, but I've blocked out the overall shape of it, following blueprints and already started making my modular wall pieces.

Jakub

Generator Room

This week I've started work on the generator room. I've experimented with the layout of how to connect it to main hall and made some adjustments to make level streaming easier. I imported my teleport system from my specialism and had to fix a couple issues with it, but once it was working it tanked the fps too much for my liking. I decided to fake the teleporter by just passing through a non-colliding wall which will create a better effect.

I then created the floor material and made it tri-planar for ease of use. When it came to making the walls of the generator I decided to go with a design that mimics the inside of a ship's hull to enhance the underwater feeling.

Kyran

Character

This week I've primarily been focusing on developing the character further in it's art and also doing some other creature based stuff with my whale- they're both looking in good shape at the current stage of the project and I feel that they will have a good impact on the environment.

VFX

so what did i learn this week?

Well, I had the pleasure of learning a few different process's this week; I've dived into some aspects of VFX, a totally new area that i've looked into, so it was alot of fun to discover how it all works, i managed to wrap my head around it and make some bubbles and steam.

Hair Cards

Lilith needed a little bit of hair so I had to investigate into the best way to do hair. I found a nice little workflow in Blender which allowed me to create a particle system for the hair, and then use an instance mesh that appended to the particle system which generated the hair cards. For the first time i've done this I was rather pleased with the results i've achieved with it thus far.

Willow

Generator

Over this last week I have been working on a few things. One of the main areas here was the generator. I elected to make this as I had made the original concept art for this asset. This started with a block out in Maya and then I continued to add detail and then further detail for my high poly and finally I now at the stages of adding the final touches in substance painter.

Character Colour Palette

I also did a color paint over for our character artist as they where unsure how to paint our original colors. So with helpful advice from our lead artist I focused on the traditional nurse color pallet with hints of magenta to reference back to our ''tears''.

Lighting and Colour Grading

This week, despite some hiccups I reached an end point and went to post processing with the lighting in our main area. This involved creating my own LUT table in Photoshop by color grading a screenshot of our scene to our reference imagery. I then applied this to unreal to create a technical duplicate of our references. I also adjusted the shadow quality and cleaned out all highlights. For the final touches I added to the idea of leading the player. For example I made our broken balcony darker with a teal tinge and our balcony with the bar the opposite with orange tinge. I also creating a leading cue by adding a warm light that bleeds out from the generator's room entrance so the player knows to go here considering this is a generally dark area.