Christmas Break Progress Report

I spent most of Christmas learning various tech art skills, as well as updating my final second year project, as I did not think it was good enough for my portfolio. My tech art learning included shader programming (HLSL), Houdini and further study of Unreal shaders. 

A tutorial by Ben Cloward helped me understand the shader pipeline, and how it relates to our programming. This is also useful for general game production, as I now know how vertex and pixel shaders work and interact with each other. This was further developed by going over a presentation by Mike Pickton about the rendering pipeline. My understanding of Unreal shaders has become more profound as a result, as the background operations are now clearer to me.

My Houdini learning involved three tutorials: Houdini Isn't Scary (basics), a pipe generator by Dokai, and an interior environment generator by Simon Verstraete. I began adding my own functionality to the pipe and environment generators, and will probably develop the environment generator further to use in the FMP. 

Green = doors

Input primitives

Intersection

I added the ability to create rooms from a user input primitive, which I can use to differentiate the props and dressing to be added later. The intersection between these rooms and the corridor is then used to generate a dividing wall with a door, which I am currently attempting to add a position parameter to. It works for each room, but each door receives the same offset, which is what I am trying to change. 

The improvements to my Egyptian project mainly involved the retexturing of almost every model, as well as a proper fire particle system. The sandstone blocks received edge highlights and stronger, sharper normal maps, and most textures required extra wear and detailing. 

In order to create the fire, I needed to learn how to create sprite sheets, and I did this in Substance Designer using functions. I found them quite simple to use, however it took me a few tries to get the animation to look correct as a particle. 

Function for transformation of perlin noise controlling warp intensity

I used the same tehnique for the smoke, and used an atlaser to combine the outputs into a spritesheet. While creating the particle system, I made the mistake of scaling the particles in the fire and coal blueprint, which created a scaling difference between the particle editor and the instance in the world. This is a mistake I will not make again. 

I also improved the lighting of the scene, by combining the faint particle firelight with point lights to create softer shadows. This made some objects seem like they were floating, and I hope to find a better way of doing this in the future. The overall lighting quality was increased by tweaking some values in the world settings.