Shot Block Outs

    I've started blocking out the main shots.

 

    Overall, it looks like I will need to model 5 new assets for these shots, the new oak trees, the saw palmetto, the bridge, the mile marker, and the small basking rock by the turtle sculpture. Once those assets are ready, I'm going to work on the water material and the lighting. I'm excited to further build out these shots and have a small interactive environment to walk through!

 

Thumbnail Sketches and PCG

    To get an idea of how I want this level to look, I've sketched out a few thumbnails for camera views as well as some top down maps.

 

    Overall, my main focus is going to be the center peninsula with the large oak tree and turtle sculpture. I'm also going to have a bridge leading up to it. If I have time after that, I'm also interested in creating the path leading to the bridge covered by an archway of oak trees. This will probably require some new versions of the tree mesh with different shapes.

 
   Aside from the sketches, I've also started to experiment with PCG. For the foliage, I made an actor that automatically places trees and ground cover wherever grass is painted. It also places reeds on any mud that's painted on the edge of the water.

 

 

   I started on a PCG actor for the bridge too. I'm using block out meshes for now just so I can figure out how the actor should function. Currently, I'm using spline meshes for the floor and top railings so they can bend. The rest of the railings and supports are instanced static meshes spaced along the spline at even increments.

   Next, I'm going to block out the main shots and start on textures for the boardwalks. 

 

 

Foliage Wind

    I've finished adding wind to all of the foliage with pivot painter.

    Next, I'm going to sketch out some thumbnails for a full scene that I can build with these assets. My general idea is to keep the layout fairly close to this current scene, but add some wetland areas and a walkway. Building this scene should also be a great opportunity to practice with PCG and World Partition.

Footprint Effect

     The footprint effect is functional now. There's still an issue where some of the prints appear in the wrong location while going up sloped surfaces. It isn't too noticeable from the player's perspective though, so I think it will suffice.

 

 

    To make the footprint textures, I basically added cubes around the feet in ZBrush and then applied a boolean to them.

    After that, I smoothed out some of the edges and then baked the imprints to a height and normal map.

    Since I divided the texture into quarters, I also used the flip book function in Unreal to make it easy to select each print based on a phase value.

    Next, I added anim notifies in the walk cycle for each frame where a foot contacts the ground.

    Finally, I added those anim notify events into the animation blueprint to trigger a spawn footprint event. This event creates a particle system and also spawns a decal.

 

    Aside from that, I also used a line trace to get the ground's physical material so I can select different effects and footprint materials based on the surface type.

    Once all of that was working, I realized that the physical material detection wasn't always the most accurate due to the relatively low polygon count of my landscape. To work around that, I made a footstep override volume. Basically, it allows me to set a specific physical material for the area within the volume, rather than pulling it from the landscape. It should also be useful in cases where there isn't collision available to represent the material, such as with decals.

    Now that I've got the footprints set up, I'm going to apply wind animations to the rest of the foliage.

Turtle Textures

    Here's some progress on the turtle textures.

    I think they are at a decent point for now. I may try mirroring some of the UVs though to get some extra texture resolution. It depends on how noticeable the mirroring ends up being. Aside from that, I also set up an AI character for the turtle and added an animation where it goes in its shell when you walk close to it.

 

 

    Next I'm going make a footprint effect for the turtle and add wind to the rest of the plants that don't have it yet.

Turtle Low Poly

    I think the low poly version of the turtle is about ready now. It currently has 5182 tris, which should be reasonable for its intended screen size. Aside from that, I also set up UVs and baked normals from the high poly version. This low poly version ended up being much easier to UV than the high poly version. The UV editor ran pretty slow when I was originally unwrapping the high poly, and it was also difficult to mark seams just because there were so many edges. 

   Next I'm going to start on textures and then project the skin weights to this new low poly version. I already tested it earlier, and it's pretty straight forward.

Turtle Animation Test

     I created a quick walk cycle to test out the rig.

 

 

    Overall the rig is fairly easy to animate with, so I'm going to move on to texturing next. I'm having a bit of trouble UVing this mesh due to its density. To make that easier, I'm going to try retopologizing so it has a lower polycount. I haven't used Maya's retopology tools too much before, but I'm finding them to be pretty intuitive and fun to use.

 

 

Starting to retopologize the shell.

        We'll see how this goes. Worst case scenario, I can set up the UVs in ZBrush instead. I'm hoping the retopolgy works out though. It should also help with performance since skeletal meshes can't use Nanite.