FMP 9- Corridor Mod Kit

 I don't have much to talk about this week, as the corridor mod kit followed the same procedure as the classroom mod kit. I also added the props I textured last week to the scene and changed the lighting slightly to adapt to that. The glass shader was the highlight of the week, giving me an interesting challenge.

One annoying development from this week is that I realised Houdini does not support multiple material IDs on the same mesh, so I had to separate the glass and window frames from their wall pieces. The matching pivot points mean that I can just merge them in the HDA though, so not much of a problem after all. The door is separate from the frame in order to allow it to open and close in-game, and to stop the AO from the frame baking onto the door. I realise that the edge wear on the wood could use more breakup, but hopefully vertex painting will allow me to do this with a less procedural look.

Even though this is just the test level, I still wanted to get the lighting scenario right before making it in the final level. I added smaller candle lights and a couple of fill lights to brighten the pitch black areas, and I moved some desks further into the light rays from the windows. I also made the chalkboard bigger, as my lecturer pointed out that the writing wouldn't be legible from the back of the classroom.

I used parallax occlusion in the glass shader to create a sense of thickness, with the dirt created in Painter as the top layer and an emissive lower layer. The AO from the frames allowed me to fade the dirt in from the edges, and this dirt will be connected to the decay parameter to build it up slowly as the level progresses. The normal details (scratches, ripples etc.) were made in Designer, as well as some slight roughness details such as wipe stains and handprints. I also subtracted human-like silhouettes from the emissive mask to give the illusion of people standing outside. These also move with the parallax occlusion. The one problem with this material is that I have to choose between god rays/ light bloom and reflections, as an opaque blend mode blocks god rays and other blend modes do not have a roughness input. The picture frames will use a photo as the lower layer, and these will work perfectly with an opaque blend mode. 

The corridor mod kit also has wear and dirt masks which were generated in painter the same way the classroom masks were, which went smoothly so nothing new to talk about there.

I began adding the new mod kit and props to the actual level through the Houdini tool, but ran into some technical problems. The tool messed up a few times in the level, duplicating or deleting random meshes, rooms etc. but a complete reset fixed this. I also have a few tweaks to make to the mod kit meshes, and after doing this in addition to adding the props and materials I can move on to clutter props and narrative details, meaning I am around one day behind schedule.