Big Boom At High Noon

As our game will now feature a town consisting of a long road with a number of forks an turns, the amount of buildings needed has increased drastically. Therefor, an efficient texturing pipeline is required as time would not allow us to texture 30,40 or even 50  buildings. Several avenues were explored: Creating a semi-procedural material in substance Designer Procedural materials would have meant we could edit parameters on a texture directly in game engine. So after apply a texture, we could change the amount of wood planks, the size, colour and level of details. Unfortunately, parameters are not accessible through the material, instead, the imported material comes with a sort of support file that controls the parameters. Making an instance of the material does not create a new support file to edit the materials, meaning every building would need a new material adding an additional draw call. This is not an option given the number of buildings we need. Texturing...

Here are the first assets for our modular town kit. And below are some examples of buildings we can piece together.

Using the colour theory i had done I had a go at adding it some to the whitebox in Photoshop.

Taking close look at the colour wheel I wanted to try and make the houses have contrasting colours so they would bounce off of each other but also not have too much going on, so I opted to have a max of 3 colours per house so not to make the world look like it has too much going on. These to pics are me trying to understand what coluors were used on old wild west buildings/movie sets, I selected the most prominent colours I could see in the pictures and then had a genreal idea of how I should do the ones for our game.   Seeing as his game has a cartoon style of game we wanted the houses not look too dull so the colours are brighter than the real buildings. These are the buildings colours I came up with, they all have similar colours having at least one of the same colour per house therefor making the seen less crowded with colour.    

While working in VR the controllers have stopped tracking in Unreal and we cant seem to find a solution. This has greatly interfered with the progress of the game and needs to be rectified. An Unreal Forum Post has been made detailing the problems and asking for any input so hopefully a response should appear soon. Here is the question posted;

Overview Scrap-Town will be made up of a total of 7 buildings. A large prison in the center with three buildings in a semi-circle on either side. Buildings will include a saloon, a store, a repair shop, and some houses, which themselves will consist of one to three tiers in height. In the interest of production time and customizability in the game engine, the buildings will be made out of modular parts that will be assembled in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). 4 base buildings (shells) will be created varying in scale and number of windows: A tiny, small, medium and large. Buildings will have a volume of 5cm to prevent players from seeing through back facing polygons.  In addition, an as yet to be determined number of windows, doors, floor and roof tiles, trimming, pipes and other assets will be created in a modular fashion once the concept art has been finalized. Scaling: Floor Tiles and Roof tiles will be 2x2meters, and all smaller objects will always needed to be round...

Initially we were going to have the buildings consist of one sided polygons. The doors and windows would then have inset, black boxes as displayed below. We also tested the scene with a model that resembled the proportions of our enemies. We realized that from the distance we had originally set, we could barely make out any of the features, so we had to make the level righter and have them closer to the player position. Next time, instead of using blocks during white box next time, Proxy mesh or something similar would prevent this from happening.  However, this reduced the visibility of the enemies due to a lack of back light, and in VR they were extremely hard to see, even with the red material.  We ran a quick test and determined we would have to give the walls of the buildings some volume (make them 2 sided) and at lighting inside the buildings to make the enemies standout.  Luckily we came across this issue before production on the proper buildin...

To save time and allow for more flexibility when editing buildings in engine, we are going for a modular approach whilst modelling Scrap Towns buildings. Before assets can be modeled, we need to experiment with what works before setting the rules and guidelines for our modular pieces to ensure everything snaps together perfectly. I imported a soldier model from Zbrush to use as a scale reference for our game's enemies  Initially I have planned to create floor and wall tiles, and build the structures this way. But I soon realised that this would not really allow for the stylised shapes, or at the very least it would restrict the amount of control would have for the more top heavy buildings.  i decided to create for building shells which could easily have more extreme shapes towards the top as long as the base size remained the same as documented.   I used the Distance Tool in Maya to ensure all measurements were accurate. Using the 4 b...

Gun Colour Test

Gun Silhouette             1. This first sheet was used to explore different shapes and ideas. A short survey of the                  class showed us that people liked 9 the most, with 6 in second place and 10 + 11 in                 joint third.            2. The above ideas were merged into more that followed themes chosen from the original                set. The team then discussed what was good about each of these forms.              3. This is the silhouette that displays all of the characteristics that suit the function of                  handguns we wanted and that best suit the gameplay after proxy tests. I will develop                  some m...

These are the early sketches provided by our concept artist, Lucila. Finalized concept art is expected by 16.10.17.