Gart230 Blog- Week six, Testing models in engine and making changes

This week I was finally able to get the whole project moved over and tested within unreal engine, I had hoped to get to this stage significantly earlier in the projects lifetime seeing as this week marks the half way point in this module. Fortunately the transition into engine went fairly smoothly with the scaling being pretty much spot on due to my previous adjustments in Maya using the unreal man asset for scale. Having fixed the UV maps of all the assets within the scene last week the lighting build also went fairly successfully with only a few objects having minor issues. I noticed for example that the shadows being cast on the floor were very blurry and blocky which really detracted from the scene as a whole. I decided to take a look at the lightmap density optimization view mode and quickly realized that the floors and pools had much lower light map density than the rest of the scene, for the pools I do not think that this is an issue as I plan to add water and caustic effects In the future and thus the performance gains of lower quality shadows out way the visual benefits as the shadows will be significantly obscured anyway.

The floors however needed to have a lightmap density comparable to the rest of the scene as the film uses shadow and light quite significantly and thus the quality of the shadows cast on the largest surface in the room need to be as detailed as possible (whilst still being cautious so as not to incur too much of a performance penalty)

Moving the assets into engine also gave me a chance to start applying simple glass textures to relevant assets such as the glazed steam room and massage rooms as well as the glass sides to the staircase, this helped to make the space feel more open as it felt very small in Maya with out any transparent surfaces, I am especially happy with how the two glass panelled rooms turned out with the frames being clearly visible through the glass but both with both the frame and the glass interacting naturally with one another  to create the illusion that they were one interconnected object. moving all the assets into engine and making the relevant changes took up most of the time I had to work on the project this week however I did also get time to model some smaller details such as stairs, steps, doors etc which helped to give the scene a bit more life. Over the next week I intend to focus on creating textures for some of the more prominent assets in the scene, I intend for the majority of this projects textures to be tile able as there are a lot of repeated textures within this scene but first I hope to go through and pick out any assets that require unique textures and get them textured as soon as possible.