Semester 3 Week 9-10

Due to some sudden busyness, I missed a week of blogging. I will include both weeks in this post. It is what it is.

After laborious troubleshooting and computer-poking, Compton was able to help me fix my issues with Unreal. Apparently the issue was with my Windows user settings, so we wiped those. I'm now able to open and edit assets, which is great because that's my job. Issues always arise, however, because I now can't use the GitHub repo at all. The programmers have changed very low-level things several times which GitHub doesn't know how to reconcile our branches. I've copied all my UAssests onto my personal drive for safe keeping as I try to delete and reclone the repo, but I haven't had luck yet.

I've had some obstacles with most of the assets I've taken on recently. Perhaps the one that I wasted the most time on was a cola bottle. The modeling was super simple, about a 15 minute job. The challenge came with the materials. Belle made the label, which is high quality and filled with goofy details as always. No problems there. The issue came with the glass bottle.

I spent hours upon hours messing with this. It seems simple, and it is simple to make it look good in Painter. But when placed in a full scene in Unreal, things break. I tried dozens of solutions, from changing material settings like blend modes, from including geometry for the inside surface of the bottle and geometry for the liquid inside. Without a refraction map, the glass looks flat and bad, so I figured out how to create a refraction map using Substance's user channels. This worked a little bit, but only from just the right distance and angle, so that was also unusable. We ended up talking about refraction, fresnel, and all the other properties of light that get super complicated when shading these sorts of transparent materials. Because of the sheer complexity of these calculations, real-time renderers just can't create the results I am looking for. I have yet to go back and fix the material, but I have some ideas for alternatives.

Continuing down my asset list, I've started getting to the more boring ones. For example, an electric generator. This one involves a lot of vaguely mechanical details and greebling. The challenge with this one was that my system of layering masks per surface type within one material gets exponentially more complex as you add more surface types. It wasn't sustainable here. I had overheard Conlen talking about ID maps before, and that's a feature that I hadn't really known anything about at all. It sounded as though it could be useful here, so I dug into it. I turned out, that's exactly what I needed. It allows me to create masks per vertex color (per object). I'll be using it plenty in the future.

This week, I got to finally see the game and my assets in VR! Correct proportions are much more important in VR. If anything's off, it will feel off. This was the case with several of them, requiring some fine tuning. The keys were too large, about the size of your palm. Most were good, including the cot and the stuffed animal. It was really neat seeing it all with depth and stuff. Exiting!