Semester 3 Week 8

Last week ended with fall break; we had Thursday and Friday off. I really enjoyed and needed the long weekend, but it did mean losing some productivity.

After great anticipation and weeks of waiting, it's time. Thank you to all my fans for being patient, I know I've been teasing this for a long time. Here's the news: I finally reattempted the hula doll. Previously, I had become comfortable with ZBrush's navigation and shortcuts and a few pipleline things as well, but I was intimidated by the sculpting itself. I found myself hyperfocusing on details, which is especially bad because my anatomy wasn't great. It took a long time, and I scrapped it all. But on this new pass, it wasn't half bad. There are some intentional flaws (as far as you know), as these sorts of dolls would be cheaply produced. For example, the legs are joined together and the hands are super simple. Call it laziness, but it has a diegetic explanation.

I'm not really well acquainted with ZBrush's remeshing system, despite my efforts. That caused some problems with the UVing and texturing process, but I hacked my way through it. In Blender, I made the skirt, ukulele and hair; and I also separated the top and bottom halves so that the rocking motion can be animated. I textured the skirt separately, as it required Designer and a masked material blend mode. I picked up a couple new nodes in the process. I rushed a few things, but I really can't spare any more time on this one small asset.

Next on the list was a cot that used to belong to the titular Emma. The frame was made with my skin modifier pipeline and the mattress is a simple beveled cube. There are a couple tricky parts, though. The mattress is suspended on a canopy of springs and wire. I didn't want to give this section a ton of geometry, so I opted to make it with a simple plane and have the material do the heavy lifting. I made the (honestly subpar) spring texture in SD and used that to create an opacity mask. Utilizing the masked blend mode in Unreal does require the springs to be a separate material and texture set from the rest of the bed, but I figure this will require less computation than the polygon-intensive alternative.

Similarly, the sheets' material and texture set will have to be unique, because I want to use the "two-sided" setting in Unreal, rather than having double the polys. I used some cloth simulation techniques in Blender to achieve the mesh. I originally wanted to use Marvelous Designer to create it, but I've decided that my plate is too full (in game dev and in my life in general) to learn yet another skill right now. I'll get there someday. I simplified the resulting geometry, but kept a hi-poly version to bake normals with later.

In other prop asset news: Belle finished a bean can label and another poster, so I'm implementing those. I've modeled but not unwrapped a generator asset.

On a separate note, we have changed engines. The programming team has tried to make UE5 work, but the VR tools are just too new and experimental. So, we're moving back in time to version 4.27. This, unfortunately, means we can't take advantage of the new Nanite and Lumen systems, but if that's the sacrifice we need to make, then so be it.

The switch hasn't gone so smoothly, though. We needed to join and clone a brand-new repo and deal with the hiccups in that process. There are some other issues the swap is causing which force you to rebuild some plugin things on every startup.

I'm having a much worse Unreal error though. Whenever I attempt to open a static mesh, Unreal crashes. This initially seemed to be another bug cased by switching over, but I found out that no one else was having the same issue, and I could do everything on my home PC just fine. I've tried it all: different Unreal versions, verifying Unreal, uninstalling and reinstalling, deleting and recloning the repo, trying different branches, the whole shebang. No luck. Hopefully that works itself out.