FMP 16- Lighting and Final Fixes

 The only new functionality I added in this final week centred around picking up pages. The player can now pick up each drawing, and some funky post process stuff affects the screen along with a heartbeat and an increase in the page counter. I also fixed my level opening problem by using a game instance blueprint (which actually opened a lot of other possibilities), built the lighting properly (a few times- there were problems) and recorded a flythrough and playthrough. 

The page is detroyed when the player picks it up, but while this happens the blueprint uses a timeline to set the vignette, grain and chromatic aberration of the player's camera. It took a while to find the correct values, but the most difficult part was getting this blueprint to communicate with the game instance. I solved this with a cast to node, and called a custom function to increase the page counter. The counter amount then gets sent to a widget to be displayed on screen. Learning about game instances was extremely useful, and something I probably should have looked into before, as I was able to open the main menu on begin play from the game instane init event with ease. 

I had several lighting problems that I fixed one by one with every build. Unfortunately, I forgot to take screenshots of these due to my panic and frustration. The first involved strange spots of light on the walls, which turned out to be sharp, strong light bounces from lights close to shiny objects. I solved this by lowering the GI contribution of the lights and the diffuse and emissive boosts of the metallic material. The second was the inaccurate lighting of movable doors, which forced me to learn about volumetric lightmap probes. I realised that they were too far apart, and light was bleeding into areas of shadow, so I lowered the voxel size to fix it. The final problem was fixed by simply rebuilding the lighting; the peeling wallpaper pieces were lighting up powerfully and randomly, an isolated incident with seemingly no cause. 

Many things went wrong during hand-in, including small tool errors, folders not uploading and the aforementioned lighting problems, but I am satisfied with the result.