Viking Table 6- Formative Hand-in

 For the final set of props, I added some sacks, a chair, fur and some coins and rings. The sacks initially looked quite stylised, and I was advised to use marvellous designer to get a more realistic shape. I followed a tutorial that taught me the basics of the programme and stitched two planes together, with some temporary apples in the middle to form the shape. The result looked much better, and I will definitely be adding Marvellous to my future workflows. A new problem made itself known just as I imported the textures into the engine, as the back facing normals on the folded section of the sacks appears extremely dark, more so in Marmoset than Unreal. I may need to add a shell modifier during the final polish week, or invert the normals and rebake in Painter.

The chair, coins and rings all went smoothly, modelling and texturing was similar to previous props. I chose a three legged stool as proper viking chairs were reserved for royalty and powerful leaders, not sea captains. The fur may need more work, even though I spent a lot of time on it. It looks quite flat, but large alphas will make it too thick, so I decided to use small, sparse alphas to add some roughness around the edges and surface. I placed them using the object paint tool in 3DS Max. I created the texture in Substance Designer, using several shapes and warp nodes in combination with the arced pavement tile generator. 

In Unreal Engine, I added lighting, particles, sound and (fake) wind. The lighting reflects the setting of a viking house during an attack on the village, which is further enhanced by the falling embers. The main lights are coming from burning holes in the ceiling, so I added a flicker function to these lights. The function is mainly driven by time being multiplied by the time parameter, which is then modified by multiplied sine and cosine nodes going into a frac to create a sharp, flashing transition. The transitions are then controlled by a power node.

The embers are formed from a shape made in Designer, using Unreal's particle system. I increased the spred, lowered the velocity range and added a light attribute. I also added random rotation and made the colour vary between light gray and fiery orange. 

The sound was recorded from tabletopaudio.com, and edited in audacity. The sequencer would not record this audio, however, and I had to add it in afterwards using windows video editor. 

For the wind, I used the world position offset to slightly move the ends of the hanging fur. I limited the effect to the fur by adding a scattering channel in Painter, and painted a mask onto the fur before blurring it. I then multiplied this with a float3 x time going into a sine and cosine multiplication, with another parameter multiplication to control the amplification. The float3 contained 3 parameters with which I ould control the xyz movement, as the fur was moving diagonally with just one float. Material instances made this process quicker, as I only had to edit the parameter values to get the right wind movement. I then recorded the scene with a sequencer.

Marmoset has much less functionality than Unreal, but it works well for making a turntable. Without particles, wind and veertex painting, the scene has less life, but the global illumination and improved shadows and lighting almost make up for it. The sacks also look a much worse, but I will work on this before the final submission.