Tyrone Mukasa-Wallace

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Project Update

Looking back at this chart, if everything had gone the way the chart says, i would have finished everything by now! I knew before starting this project that this would be in an ideal world, i would have this finished by the start of July. This is the exact reason as to why i gave myself a buffer period of a month and a half. With life's expectancies and unpredictable nature, this is the reason why i drafted the chart in this fashion.

With the final deadline on August 17th, i still currently have over a month of time until the submission date, and im very confident i will have a piece of work that i will be proud to submit.

Currently i would say im in the finalise process, there are still a few additional things i need to add or change, such as one more corridor to for the dark light theme, sound designs and a few more little extras, so im nearing the presentation and promo phase, which i would like to make a start on roughly around the 20th of July. Having coming towards the end of the project though, in relation to the chart, there are a few things that i would change, i mentioned before how when modelling on making materials, doing them all at the same time can help because you're in that mindset and work flow of creating that particular part of the asset. However i also found while making this scene, when you do that, you find yourself almost half making a piece, and then having to come back to it later, which is also not ideal in my opinions, often i would find myself creating a asset and wanting to see it all the way through from the modelling to the UVs to the materials and into the scene. Which made me realise that creating these environments can sometimes not always have such a cut and try workflow. Especially when its a single developer/artist, as this maybe different when working in a group or with other people.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Gameplay

Big update on this gameplay wise, i have now completed both the keypad system on a door, along with a working count down timer at the top of the door.

The timer will countdown from 1 minute at the top of every door, which is to incentivise the player in completing the level before the timer runs out. As this is a demo, the timer acts as a sense of urgency for the player to try to complete the level or escape promptly so therefore doesn't have anything planned to happen once it reaches 0, though i do plan on potentially integrating something along with that in the promo video.

With the Keypad, the door in the second room has a keypad placed clearly on the front, when interreacted with, the player can insert a code, the wrong code relays a incorrect password message, and the right password opens the door, the code is placed on the wall through the window of the second corridor, though i haven't actually added that yet.

With these complete im happy with the gameplay mechanics that the game now offers, with buttons to open doors and keypads, and a countdown timer. In the third room im thinking i need to create the last puzzle, where there is multiple buttons and some clue as to which button is the correct one to press, and if the wrong one is pressed then its game over, however i dont know if i want to deviate to much from the 3D environment aspect of things with gameplay mechanics. Instead i might just model the different buttons and have them all work anyway, but show the gameplay element of it.

I do have a visual bug with the keypad but i just need to redo the UV's and that should be fixed quite easily.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Gameplay

I added in a second corridor beyond the first door, it is near enough identical from the first however there is a window that the player can look through. My first thought was to include the use of interior parallax mapping, this way i could save on performance, however i ended up deciding against that because of the use cases that i have going forward with the window.

The first being the window will be used for gameplay purposes, with the player actively looking through it for information, the idea is that the player will find a code on the wall that the player will then use to open the next door, so i want the room in the window to look as clean as possible. Another reason is that i want it to look as real as possible, and with parallax mapping it can look a little distorted if looked at from awkward angles, so i re-made the hallway on the other side with only the parts needed that can be visually scene from the window, after testing the performance i am still able to run the game with a health 90FPS.

I will soon at the keypad system to the door, along with a code on the other side of the window on the wall somewhere for the player to locate to enter into the keypad to open the door.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Gameplay

Today ive made some progress towards the gameplay side of things as i feel i am nearing that aspect of things so wanted to just get some things done in regards to it.

I've been working on getting the door to open on activation of a button. As the button is not a part of the reference image and will be additional ive just used a quick basic tube for the time being. But i have set up a blueprint in unreal for the player to interact with the button when within a certain distance, and have the doors open when they do. I came under a brief issue where the doors was snapping to a different location first and then opening from there. However i managed to fix this as noticed the door wasn't positioned in x = 0 position in the viewport, therefore as the blueprint simulates the door was snapping to that location first, so i reimported the doors and frames all together from Maya and that sorted the problem!

I will need to sort out the collision for this as currently the player can not walk through the door.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Lighting

Some more progress on the lighting aspect, added exponential fog, post process volume, and a dust particle system using Niagara to add more ambiance to the scene to really capture that space station feel. I also added an emissive colour to the middle of the arches. With all these additions the scene is very much coming together! I do still want to make more changes to the lighting aspect to see if i can improve it, and i will also have to consider the dark hallway to do also.

There is a slight creative direction that i might need to think on slightly too, in the original reference photo, the lighting is very bright and clean, however im not sure if thats exactly how i want my scene to look, feel and play, i think it would be more fitting if the lighting was a bit more sinister and moody to create that real ambiance. Just some things to think on, maybe try both and see, as part of the plan was to have it more darker, however i do want to stay true to the reference image.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Lighting

I have started to make some progress on the lighting aspect of the scene, i have only worked on some basics so far. Messing around with some directional light, as well as point lights and rect lights where the light emits from the lights in the roof. I also added an emissive colour to the lights in the roof to give off that glowing effect, however the actually light source will be powered by other means.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Modelling

I had to make some more adjustments to the model of the roof, changing the position of the where the lights are placed, as things wasn't aligning quite where they should have been. The lights was being covered by the pipes, so i had to move the lights in slightly on the roof model to correct this, and it came out all good as shown in the images!

I had also added the roof into the scene after apply it with the trim sheet i had made, and im very happy with the results!

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

How the scene is looking with the updated floor using the newly made trim sheet! I also had forgotten to add the trim sheet to the roof too! As i had originally planned on having the roof have its own texture set, however it will use near enough the same texture as the walls, so i can just make a material instance in unreal to make those tweaks instead and use the trim sheet for the roof!

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

I've completed the trim sheets and im very happy with it, so i have good fair that it will look really good in engine. Using trim sheets for this was the best outcome as i will use them more so than anticipated. I put it in Maya and sorted the UV's for all the pieces that will utilise the trim sheets. I have yet to bring them into unreal and test them out yet and make the materials in engine.

The trim sheet contains a base wall texture, as well as wall texture with detailing on it that will be used around some outer edges, and a kind of line indent for joining edges. Then there is the floor parts with the main body and edges. I do think i may need to revisit this just as to work on the opacity mask parts as when i get around to creating the corridor that has a like night time mode aspect to it, there are parts in the floor that emit a orange light so will need to make sure i get that working to add emissive colours there.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

I've been making the trim sheets for the floor texturing, as i believe this would be the most efficient way to create them as well as save on some performance costs. First thing i had to do however is plan what pieces would be using the trim sheet, i needed to organise a way to fit all of those components to be used on the trim sheet, so i created a quick sketch to visually see how the trim sheet would be arranged.

This is what i came up with after some consideration and taking into account what i will actually use the trim sheet for, i was contemplating making 2 trim sheets at first, one for the floor and one with different wall pieces, however i was looking at this from the wrong perspective as i then remembered that trim sheets can have a load of different use cases on them at once. So i just brought them both together on the same trim sheet rather than having two. As this was only my second time making a trim sheet, there was a few articles and documentation i found really useful to help me, Like Scot Daniel burns article for Beyond Extent was very helpful and good read (Burns, 2026). Burns, S. D., 2026. BeyondExtent. [Online] Available at: https://www.beyondextent.com/deep-dives/trimsheets [Accessed April 2026].

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Update

Update on the FMP, the past few weeks i have been focusing on other modules as well as working my job a lot as it was the Easter half term, therefore i put the FMP on hold for a bit. Now that the Easter half term has finished and my other module has been completed and handed, i can now focus on my FMP again.

I'm looking forward to getting back into this and making more progress towards it! I already can get straight back into things as i know i need to create a trim sheet for the floor plus other areas around the scene, so that will be the next thing i will be working towards!

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

I've been continuing on texturing more parts of the scene. I used the material i made on the door as i made it into a smart material, and then used that material on the walls and lower vents, this way i can keep the consistency between the textures of the different objects. I have been tampering with the materials a lot to get the best results. I wanted to make sure that the texture had a nice glossy finish, i didn't want to much roughness so that you can see reflections within the panel, but enough metallic to give that clean shine. This along with some surface imperfections and scratches using some grunge maps help bring it to life even more!

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

Been working on the door frame texturing part, i used a lot of components from the arches to create the door frame in painter to keep that same level of consistency between pieces, a lot of the same colour hexes, metallic and roughness etc are all the same, this will help give the level a sense of belonging and uniform that i want in the level.

Im happy with the way that it has turned out, especially with the smaller details on the door like the text. I do need to re-evaluate the scale slightly, when playing the level, the door seems a lot bigger than the character model, so when the character approaches the door, where the keypad will be seems to high in relation to the characters eye level, so either i need to scale things down, or make the character model tall, but i will think about this in the near future.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

I made a master material for the arches, with the master material ive set it up so that i will be able to amend the textures slightly, this is to set me up better in the future when the different hallways will have different looks and feels. I have set up parameters for texture maps, and added a section where i can add imperfections to the material, so i can add things like scratches or smudges directly rather than have to add them inside of painter and reimport new textures again. i can also change instances regarding the material such as brightness, saturation, and contrast across all textures, as well as increase or decrease the normal map. I will also be able to copy this template and use on other materials provided i change the texture maps, so i will be able to use it across all of the materials i have.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

I had realised that the way i had made the arch materials was very inefficient. What i had done is in Maya, i had assigned a different material for each of the different parts that the arch has, meaning i had 5 different materials to make up the arch object. With this, meant that with each material consisted of a base colour, normal, metallic, roughness, emissive, height and AO maps, 5 times for all of the materials, which is so much data. Instead of doing it this very inefficient way, i went back into Maya to unassigned all of the different materials, went into painter and used the polygon selection tool and assigned the different textures there all onto the same UDIM, this way, all of the different texture maps can be used for the whole object, not just a part of it. Doing it this way saves so much space, otherwise i would have 5 times the amount of texture data than i actually needed.

When remaking the materials, i imported the new materials into unreal and the colours was vastly different to what it looked like in painter, after so research i found that the two interpret colour differently, in order to combat this, i exported the base colour as a targa rather than png. I wanted to use png to keep file sizes down, so for the base colour exported as a targa format, and everything else is exported as png. This way i can still keep down the file sizes as well as keep the consistency for the base colour.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Texturing

After putting together some of the objects that are in the scene together, i felt it was at a good place to start texturing a few things. I know that i am not done yet with the modelling completely yet however i felt that i needed to get a better sense of direction and feel for the environment moving forward so i starting looking at texturing something. I decided to texture the arches in the hallways as these dont have any variables textures, so i could focus on just that one texture. After taking it into substance painter, i worked on the textures using the some of the smart materials and tweaked them into making them my own to something that i was happy with.

I needed to make sure that the texture for this was really good, the quality needed to be high the aspects of the textures needed to be correct to keep a good consistency between this texture and the others. All of the other textures will be similar in look and feel, so the consistency of the textures needs to be the same. What i am thinking of doing is using the same material for other objects in the seen, however just changing the base colour map, that way saving resources across materials.

[tyronemw]

Final Major Project - Modelling

Here is the roof that i had made, after creating it in Maya i brought it into unreal engine to make sure the scale was all correct. There is still a small gap near the top of the hallway still which i need to make sure closes up and have a look at fixing still. There is also a small issue with the spacing between where the pipes need to go and the lighting on the roof, i may need to go back into Maya and edit the roof slightly so that the pipes will not block the lights on the roof.