Week 9 and 10

After the alpha we created yet another new plan to keep us on track.  We made sure to not underestimate the time it would take to get things done, accounting in time for unexpected errors.

- One of the main areas for the group to focus on was improving textures. One of the main areas I focused on was my Easter Island head cave supports as the original diffuse was a simple grey rock texture. I wanted to make them fit in with the style of the boss so I used the idea of glowing cracks in them (using an emmisive like I had done with the mine carts). I changed the colour to blue to show how the supports are part of the alien technology.

- In order to add more interest to the walls of the tunnel it was suggested to add variation. I first tried extruding the faces but this lead to stretching on the texture and the extrusions did not look realistic. I then tried moving some of the vertices out to make the tunnel walls less smooth. This work better but I still did not fully understand the best way to create roughness on the walls. In order to fix this, Rob took over the tunnel as he had just used a technique on the valley involving edge loops and edge extruding that could be applied to the tunnel. I then continued to work on my other assets while he completed this task.

- I did a quick list of what needed to get done to help Rob the team leader out as he was busy. This helped us visualize what was still left to be done.

Week 7 and 8

During Week 7 there was a change in team leader, with Rob taking over from Molly. This turned out to be a good move for the team as the new leader made a new plan of action to get us on track for alpha presentation and the communication between the team improved. Rob also made sure no one was taking on too much work or vice versa by reassigning some job roles, with the terrain being split up. I took over control of the tunnel as I had all the assets inside the tunnel. Molly took over the role of Unity, Reece was tasked with animation whilst Luke and Rob did other environment work.

I felt that this would help as I wanted to see everything get into Unity for weeks prior and reorganising the job roles made this more likely to happen.

There was quite an in-depth conversation about whether or not the mine cart track should follow the exact centre of the tunnel. Although this would be more accurate to real life, I felt that it wouldn't look very interesting for the player to simply be following a track through the tunnel. It would also make the idea of dodging pillars and crates less easy to implement as the player could just safely follow the track through the centre of the tunnel as there would be no central pillars to dodge.

Week 8 was the alpha presentation so our group went through a crunch to get everything done in time. We made sure that everything was modelled, UV'd and had at least base textures on. I focused on getting the tunnel and tracks textured.

When working on the walls of my tunnel I found an issue with the normals on the walls. The original normal map that I added was too rough but the walls needed some form of normals to look rock-like. To counteract this I smoothed the normal map in Photoshop with a small amount of surface blur. This reduced the noise yet kept the effect of the normal map. I added in some lighting to show the effect this would have when put in game.

No Normals

Harsh Normals

Smoothed Normals using Surface Blur in Photoshop