WEEK8 – PREPARING FOR HALF

It has been a productive week, we finished the interactions, build up the art pipeline, integrated all the art assets we have and working towards to finish the demo for halves.

Art

This week, we went into some problems with exporting and importing animations from Maya into Unreal Engine 4. Almost every model has its own problems and our artists were trying their best to figure out the reasons. Since both of the artists in our team were not really 3D artists before, they didn’t have any knowledge regarding this kind of problems.

We ended up baking all the animations into each model and deleting all the non-deformer history before exporting it. However, this still didn’t work on the flower. We spent a whole day trying to fix the problem with flower’s animation. It turned out to be several problems with the flower, which is why it took us so long trying to figure out why. First of all, there were some deformer history left in the model, which is because we transformed our model after we animated some part of the flower. We looked up online and couldn’t find any solution to this problem. Thus we basically redid the animation. Besides, there used to be two separate sets of joints for the flower model, which also created some problems. After we connected all the joints, the flower model deformed really badly, which was because of the weight since the petals are all too close to each other. We also learned that visibility won’t work in Unreal.

Other than that, we finished making the animation for the monster and showed it to some people. They all say that this looks pretty terrifying especially when imagining seeing it in front of you in VR.

Programming

This week, gameplay-wise, we worked on interactions with butterfly and ladybug. In the scene, now there will some auto spawn butterflies and ladybugs. For ladybug, it will stay on the ground and it will start to fly away when the player looks at it. For butterfly, it will randomly fly in the scene and circle around player’s hand if it’s close enough. We expect these subtle interactions will increase player’s feeling of presence in the scene.

Besides, we integrate the flower animation into the experience. Now the player will see the flower become blossom if it’s picked up, and the flower will be wilt if it’s thrown away. For the first scene, we complete the fog interaction. Now the fog will be faded out if the player looks around or stays for sometime, which will be the first interaction in our experience.

We also polished the art of butterfly, refine its material and makes it look better.

Sound

Our sound designer has finished the transformation bgm and SFX for multiple interactions including flower pick-up, blossom and wilting sound and crying sound. We will integrate all these sound into our demo soon.

Production

We are preparing for our halves this week, refining our presentation materials. We have gone through our design process and reviewed all the feedback in the ¼ walkthrough. We have also practiced our speech for several times.

We are looking forward to demo our progress at halves and receive feedback to push the quality of our project!