Model Troubleshooting [WEEK 10]

Troubleshooting -

In this lesson I hoped to fix some issues one of my team members brought up to me about my 3D models, i was informed by Pantelis that he tried to bring one of my models into blender to use in a scene that he was creating, however he noticed that for some reason there were a lot of strange points that showed up when bringing my model in, and he wasn't sure the reasoning for this. Looking into the issue on my end, it turns out I had forgotten to delete the history on my model and so those points that were showing up were the transformations that i had made to my model. This was a very easy fix all i had to do was delete by history, and i also exported my model as both an FBX and and OBJ rather than a Maya binary file in hopes that this will be easier for Pantelis to use in blender. I also used the advice from last lesson about resizing models in Maya to be put in Unreal, so i made sure to go back and resize [And delete the history] on all my models so that Pan will be able to use all of my models to his liking without any further issue.

Advice-

Looking at my 3D model entitled "Elephant's Earring" Pantelis mentioned how there was a lot of overlapping geometry on my models, this isn't a huge issue, but is definitely not optimized. He explained that he wants to make the geometry simpler by baking my models onto a lower poly model, that way there wont be any of the strange pixelation on my model which i think is a very good idea, however i had a lot of issues with baking last year, i really struggled to get my head around it, Pantelis explained that he is able to do this himself quite easily and hopefully result in a neater and more optimized final product, he urged me to carry on making models, and on his end as the 3D lead, he will tweak them to make them look best in our game.

Checking my models can be brought into Unreal -

Something I did want to check is that my models can be brought into Unreal engine, I worried that with the issues Pan had identified that my models would not be able to be brought in, and that i had wasted a lot of time on something inevitably useless. Following the tutorial from last lesson, i imported my model into the scene using the import, import into scene, and select FBX option. I then saved my model in the content folder and pressed import. I then dragged my model into the scene. I was very pleased to see that this worked, and i did not need to scale my models down by much, I did think that importing textures would be much more difficult than it was, all i had to do was drag my texture from my files into the content box, then drag my texture onto the model. This resulted in the image above which i was very very happy to see that everything worked well. I did look into adding in the cell shading filter over my models to better fit the artist's style, however i was informed by a tutorial online that this is best applied after all models are in the scene, so this is something my team and i will probably tackle after Christmas break when all of our 3D models are finalized and we are ready to assemble our scene.

I decided to bring all of my models into Unreal and assemble them into the basic 1st person view, just to see how they all look together and kind of give a better understanding to how our game will look. I am very happy to see that my textures look quite good in engine, and with adjusting the hue of the sun, all the colours are fairly equalized across my models. This was really interesting to see and is making me very excited to see the final project. I shared this with my team who all liked the progress so far, only giving me the advice to carry on making more models.

When changing the  colour of the sun it gave me an idea that we could maybe find a way to change the lighting of the scene depending on what biome or area of the map youre in. For example the city and savannah biome would be yellow meanwhile Deep jungle is bright purple, when walking closer to the jungle the sun colour would slowly change to indicate the change in locations. The colour of the sun also changes how the colours on the textures look, i think this could be very visually interesting and make our game stand out more. I also think that rigging my models to have physics would also be very cool, especially the vines on the snakeskin tree. I did start doing this a few weeks back but did not finish rigging due to time constraints, if i have the time, this is something i really would like to have another go at. Meeting with my team, Niamh also suggested for us to include some of my aquatic plants as 3D models, if we can have a small pond in the scene this could showcase some more varieties of plants. She gave the idea of combining 3D and 2D elements, such as a 2D lily pad with a 3D flower on top. This is something i will have to talk to my team more about when we next have a meeting. 

My next steps from here are to get a more 2D animals drawn, and make another 3D model to bring my gantt chart progress up to 75% complete for the animal journal entries, and 50% done for my 3D models. I am feeling quite motivated with this project and i am genuinely enjoying the creation process for all my assets, now that this project is coming together in a more visible way, i am inspired to create a lot of supplementary work such as sound design, lore notes and maybe some miscellaneous background elements, though my main focus will be on my planned deliverables, i would like to try to make time to make these supplementary elements to really help build a better idea of how our game would look.