"Sharn, we've got some bad news...."

I made a rookie mistake with my last blog post, I said the project was going well and we were on schedule and nearly finished which naturally opened the flood gates for disaster.

On Monday afternoon having just finished explaining to a tutor how well everything seemed to be going the rest of the team appeared with excellent comedic timing to tell me that it had broken.

Nobody knows what happened but the short version of the problem is we lost the sun, no idea where it went and it didn't have any intention of coming back. Having left Unreal 4 idle and to it's own devices for a few moments it seemed to have misplaced the skybox which was a fairly big problem to begin with but this also broke the lighting we had set up in scene and turned the metal textures black again. In the end the only option we had was to rebuild the scene in a new file. On this day we learnt a valuable lesson about backing up files.

On the plus side when we did rebuild it the bar fit in a lot easier with the new remodelled version, the with the improved UV unwrap the textures didn't blur and stretch on the model and this also left me with room to dedicate more space to the part of the counter that would have the shared bump map with other metallic objects so that stopped looking completely awful. Also while looking at the original scene idea I noticed that the far end of the bar was capped off by an extra piece of the counter that was actually fairly visible so I modelled and added into the asset as well. 

Looking at the version I had and the remodelled version it's quite clear what the problems we were having with this model were caused by, those original corners are pretty poorly made. The bend modifier had been giving me a lot of trouble so at the time achieving those curves had been a victory but returning to this modifier for the remodel I had a bit of a eureka moment and realised a simple solution had been staring me in the face, so I moved the pivot point a few centimetres and it was fixed.





As you can image this week had suddenly become very busy so when the sun left he took my earlier plans to work with blueprints with him but while that had to be taken off the table I was once again troubleshooting in the material editor when connecting up sign texture in scene provided a new hurdle. Since the material was a shared texture sheet and a lot of information in it was controlled by the Albedo map such as the emissive colour we had a few problems with glowing windows which were just a little more than noticeable. So I set about getting a mask working within the material. I'm not actually too sure about how technically accurate it is as far as materials go but it did the job I wanted so at least it's not wrong.

So in the end, the end being 9PM the night before hand in, the scene was up and running again but we couldn't quite get the lighting and camera angle back to the level we were happy with like on the original file so it was never going to match up perfectly with the film still but it came out alright all the same and in terms of group work the project was a success in my eyes, everyone did their part and more and we produced a finished scene, twice technically. I've really enjoyed this project more so that I thought I would, the team aspect made working a lot more fun and kept me motivated, I'm sad to hand it in and move onto the solo sentry gun project.

So this is the final scene we ended up with. There are lots of improvements that could be made, as I mentioned the lighting and our camera angle isn't quite right. My textures on the street outside also look a lot plainer and block colour than I'd like there are also a couple of errors on the texture that slipped by our notice until we were staring at it on the presentation screen. Again, not perfect but we did alright.