WEEK 7 – DEVELOPING, DEVELOPING….
Hi, all
This week, we were working towards finishing the first scene and the second scenes of the experience complete enough to play through. We also have several visitors including Jessica Trybus and Eric Brown, who gave us feedback on our story and prototype, which is quite help to integrate their advice into our production.
Art
This week our artists were still creating art assets for our experience including models, textures, and animations.
First of all, we finished the texture and animation for the butterfly we made the week before as well as the animation for the ladybug. Thus we already have butterflies and ladybugs for our environment as moving objects to make the environment feel rich.
After testing our original flower, we decided to remodel the flower to make it look better and add some more detailed animations to it. We refined the animation sequence from withered to blossom and also made vivid texture to it.
As for the monster, which player will see after the transformation, we started to model it this week and tried two different kinds of designs. Monsters are critical elements in our experience, since it is supposed to bring the feeling of fear to players. After researching references of different styles online, we decided to go with the design below, which we believe fit with our style.
Besides, we re-rigged our cute little black creature so that it can be better controlled and animated. Now we are able to make the creature squash and bounce. We’ve created a list of animations for the creature and we are still in the process of animating it.
Programming
For programming part, this week, we rebuild our environment map with a larger terrain and more detailed material. For landscape material, we were trying to use tessellation material since the modern graphic pipeline can render tons of polygon really fast. However, we found out that tessellation for terrain is with less quality while the number of polygon will cost a bunch of performance, which should not be applied in VR. So we gave up the tessellation to spare more graphics capability for other environment objects such as fog and grass.
Since the planar reflection will cost 15-20% of our performance, we decide to optimize it. Because the environment can be reflected by screen space reflection (SSR) which is a really cheap technique, we decide to only use the planar reflection for our human figure, and blend it with the SSR. This optimization has increased our frame rate.
From gameplay perspective, we implemented a new controller for fog density in the first scene of our story which will be used to react to the interaction of the player in the first scene. We also have integrated our hand controller in our scene which works well with the motion controller. Since we haven’t gotten the touch yet, we also implemented a system to respond to input from Oculus Remote. During the implementation process, we found that using blueprint only system is not quite efficient to deal with various situation where in C++, it’s just lines of code. So our programmer starts to learn the C++ in the Unreal Engine, and created some helper class to achieve function that is time consuming in Blueprint class.
Sound
We are very excited to have a new sound designer to join our team. Julian Korzeniowsky, who is a ETC first year and interested in creating creating music for VR experiences . He looked at our project and showed great interest. His classical music background also well fits our story theme. At the end of this week, we have a piece of bgm that is prototyped based on the emotion and concept of our story. We have created the sound assets and timeline, and look forward to more music in the coming week.
Next
For next week, we are going to finish the first scene, second scene, integrate our scene together to get an overall feeling. Since, we have finished most our art assets, we are going to focus on animation and how to make the scene looks more lively. Besides, we will be preparing for halves and getting ready to demo our progress so far.