#bagdyear2

[simranwhithamfutureworks-blog]

XB2002 Assignment Three - Environment Art

The Environment Art Scene Fly Through and Trailer:

For my final development milestone of my low poly environment, I created a flythrough/reveal trailer for the whole environment scene itself.

For the trailer, my main focus was to capture the majority of the environment within the Unreal project and have a seamlessly smooth transition throughout the whole thing for the camera’s projectile path it takes.

For the camera and video itself, the video was captured on a matinee keyframe animated camera, and upon completion of the matinee’s route rendered out the Matinee’s movie projected path at a 1080p 60 frames per second video at the MP4 format.

From here it was the case of taking the Unreal matinee movie and importing it into Adobe Premiere Pro and adding visual effects such as the transition to white in the title and credits scene and adding the soundtrack Floating Home over the video.

Within Adobe Premiere Pro I also compressed and rendered the video from its initially slow speed Unreal video file, and from here was able to acquire the smooth flow of movement visible in the video above.

I am very satisfied with the final version of the reveal trailer for the whole low poly environment scene, as it has allowed me to develop my 3D modelling, environment art, and Unreal materials skillsets.

One of the design challenges I faced within the video creation process of the project was creating the right visual effects for the video to make it more professional, as my creative milestone aim for this video was to create a fly through that resembles that of an actual game reveal trailer.

Overall I believe the trailer video manages to good a good job of showcasing the environment itself and capturing the emotional feeling of the visually displayed environment and it’s narrative and matches that of the initial concept idea I had for the environment from the beginning of the project.

[jemmaparkinfutureworks]

XB2001 - Assignment 3 - Mechanic Challenge - The Gap

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XB2001 - Assignment 3 - Mechanic Challenge - The Tower

[jemmaparkinfutureworks]

XB2001 - Assignment 4 - Group Project - Environment / Lighting Flythrough

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XB2002 - Assignment Three - Modular Modelling - Flythrough

[jemmaparkinfutureworks]

XB2001 - Assignment Two - Single Player Level - Final Walkthrough

[candytangle]

Assignment 3: The Gap - Evaluation

The aim of this mechanic challenge was to get from one side of a gap to the other. I knew that I wanted to use lights and colours in some way.

My initial thoughts were to do something similar to the logic game Lights Out. In this the player must turn out all the lit squares. Clicking on a cell toggles that cell and each of its immediate neighbours.

My version of this was for the player to get from one side to the other by traversing hexagonal tiles that appear or disappear depending the colour of the tile the player is currently stood on.

The structure of the map was really straightforward as I knew exactly what I wanted it play like.

My biggest struggle was to actually figure out the best way for the lights to register which colour the player is already stood on and which other colours need to function.

I started very basically by adding collision boxes to each individual tile with the intention of it registering the surrounding four tiles. This however had numerous problems and I could not work out how to make work exactly like the lights-out game I had envisioned.

After some researching through various tutorials and speaking to some unreal experts, I realised that the best way to be able to have the tiles appear and disappear as I wish, would be to create and array for each set of colour tiles.

Using this array, I could have the collision of each tile run multiple events to both hide and unhide tiles. So, as per the image below, when the player walks on to a PINK tile, the blue tiles appear and the Yellow, disappear.      

Once this was set up and working correctly, I began to tweak some of the minor details. Such as altering the shape of the tile from square to octagonal to prevent players being able to cheat and cut across corners when tiles were transitioning from one state to another. I also built in a basic respawn system, not because the player could die or fall off the edge of the platform (because I made it so the player could not fall) , but because it was very easy for the player to get stranded or take the wrong route and be unable to return due to the nature of the way the platforms only appearing depending on the colours. 

Originally I made the restart button the spacebar, but after player feedback I swiftly changed it to X as players would instinctively want to hit spacebar to jump, even though the jump ability was disabled completely.

Finally, I added floating text to the beginning to let the players know they could reset the level, and some fireworks with floating text that would appear only upon reaching the other side of the gap. 

Overall, I feel like this challenge was really successful. I spent far longer on this mechanic challenge than I originally anticipated. But it turned out far better than I planned also, and I learned several completely brand new skills by doing it.