This week has been a surprisingly straight forward one, almost scarily so, everything has gone rather smoothly, no big issues or problems, boringly straight forward really. My environment has been developing along nicely, I would almost say to plan but whether that's down to me or down to the luck of the draw for the week remains to be determined. At the end of last week I was fairly confident on my direction for the project and what the major challenges would be, namely the lighting and colour palette, and this week I've spent the first half and a sprinkling of the second building my assets and most of the textures for a first pass of the space before painting over this to get more of a sense of how this is all gonna turn out in the end.
The asset creation has been all rather standard unfortunately since most of the project is low poly there hasn't been all too much going into them. Most of the focus has been on the design of the space, repeating shapes and patterns to help create a very concentrated continuity in the garden. There were a couple models that proved more challenging however firstly was figuring out how to achieve a raked sand effect, would it be achieved through the texture or geometry and with the latter how much of my budget was gonna be devoured by it? In the end I went with the latter as I felt this would create the more convincing effect and currently the mesh is quite comfortably under 30K tris so it hasn't eaten incredibly into the budget though it remains an expensive asset. Secondly I've spent a couple days working on some rocks which was a bit of a rough start really, the problem is I have absolutely no confidence in my rock creation abilities so it took a while before I found my stride in sculpting them. Personally while I have a result I'm not 100% happy with them but I've spent enough time on them so for now they'll have to do though I do plan on working into their textures more next week
With the majority of assets in engine mid-week I felt it would be important to paint over what I had to create a visual touch stone of what the end result would hopefully be which till now was still a relatively fuzzy notion and handful of buzzwords. It's not hugely polished, a matter of time more than anything, yet I feel it gets across what I need with colours, lighting etc. These two are, as I mentioned last week, key to the success of the project and while they've been on my mind all week I'm conscious I've left it fairly late in the day without having acted on them in engine.
That's next week's task, refining the lighting and atmosphere in engine to meet what I've painted above. Friday saw what I deemed a soft geometry lock meaning that for the most part the models in engine will be what gets handed in, warts and all. I'm planning to do the same with textures early next week although I want to work into the lighting and post processing before I do so. Finally there remains the question of the northern lights, I still don't really know how I'm gonna execute them. The spline meshes are a first step but if I can't create a convincing effect next week they'll have to be cut before submission. Finally there's the usual clean up to meet the brief's budget which while currently "under control" still hasn't been probably checked.
I feel that the work that remains to be done it's not too much of stretch to believe I can get it done for Friday's submission. That's a nice if not slightly new feeling since returning to labs. With pretty much the geometry finished alongside most of the materials all that really remains is the lighting and northern lights, my two big heavy hitters so there's still a lot that can and, let's admit it, most likely will go wrong. I'm not too panicked though, like I said in the four days I have left to work on it I believe I can reach a comfortable conclusion with the project, it might not be perfect but it will be finished.
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