29th November 2022
After taking one final look at my scene I decided to add one more asset in the form of a rocking chair on the porch. I won't go into detail about this portion, as (again) I have done the high-to-low baking multiple times over the course of my University life. However, I did learn how to use the NCloth system in Maya in order to create a pillow to set up on said rocking chair.
NCloth can be used, quite simply, to emulate cloth physics in Maya by using gravity mixed with other factors (curtains, cushions, hanging coats, etc.) to create solid polygonal meshes that can then be textured in other software.
Step 1 - Create a Cube (or any other shape, but in my case it was a cube with quite a lot of geometry to allow for realistic physics. I used 50x50x10 (H x W x D)
Step 2 - Go into the FX Panel and Create the NCloth
Step 3 - Set the Gravity to 0 and the Pressure to 0.5
Step 4 - Press the play button on the animation and watch as the pillow poofs up.
Step 5 - Generate the Low Poly Mesh from the NCloth Model (I use reduce and then retopologise if needed)
Step 6 - Display the shapes in the outliner and then delete the ones that don't need to be exported (just the mesh itself). I learned this the hard way and ended up with errors before I found a tutorial that showed how to export them properly.
From there it was a matter of simply treating the mesh as I would any other mesh, unwrapping it before taking it into Substance Painter and applying my usual technique of building layer after layer to create something unique. I did make sure to add wear to the pillow, as it is supposed to be sitting on a porch in the woods, so that was something I kept in mind.
1st December 2022
As Vice Chair of Comms for Games Art Society at Teesside University, I attended GameBridge and displayed my work alongside other Society members. During this I recieved feedback from artists at Double Eleven, Radical Forge, DogBox Games. As such I wasn't able to do much work that day.
2nd December 2022
Today I met with my lecturer, Paul, and recieved verbal feedback on the initial build of my environment from both him and my classmates -- I did this as I'd been working for so long on the build that I needed a new pair of eyes to see any errors I may have missed.
The feedback was positive, thankfully, except for a few details that I could work on. These were:
- Change the alignment of the logs on the cabin to interlock better, as geometrically the initial build was impossible.
- Add dirt and moss to the logs as they looked too clean
- Add scatter assets around the cabin such as rocks and logs. I downloaded two rocks from Quixel, scattering those, and then created logs using the same method I used to create the tree stump.
- Add variation in height to the landscape
- Add variation in density to foliage, and make the initial pathway narrower on the lead-up to the cabin
All of these changes were fixed that very day, and I was ready to take my final beauty shots the next day when I remembered that I hadn't added in a screen mesh to the screen door. This was something I fixed as soon as I realized, taking a screen mesh from a free texture website (royalty free) and assigning it to a flat plane, before scaling it to size in-engine.
After that, I focused on lighting. To get the result I wanted, I did just stick to the basic Directional light and Exponential Height Fog combo we are initially given in UE5 when the level is built, but I wanted to try to create a Sunset, having the Directional light on the left of the screen as in the general level, this would be due west.
I activated Light Shafts within the directional light and added exposure in the PostProcess Volume, before stepping back.
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| Before Fixes |
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| After Fixes |
Once that was done, it was finally time to generate some beauty shots (one of which you can see above) and post them to art station.
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