Rewind Presentation

Today I went to present my project at Rewind. I showed the team my environment and received some valuable feedback. 

They felt that the scene was well made but would have liked the environment to communicate the story to the player. I admit that when I was creating the environment I looked at various different sci-fi elements that I thought looked cool and incorporated them into my scene. The end result lacks cohesion and I agree with the team that had I kept things more focused then the final level could have been much better. I wish I had drawn more attention to the loading bay area which houses the mech. If I had signposted the players attention to that area, I could have conveyed more of the story through the environment. 

This is an aspect that I really want to improve upon during the development of my major project. The team said that the hangar environment looked nice but felt more like the generic parts of a level a player will have to get through rather than a key location. My major project environment will need to be clear in what areas are important. I want to focus the players’ attention to specific areas and this method may even save me time in the long run. After all, why spend hours working on a vast area that elicits no emotion when you can be far more successful with a smaller more focused area.

Regardless I feel this lack of emotional interest is something that all my environments have suffered from. I will be aiming to correct this in my next project.

Rewind: Completed Video

As part of the deliverables for the Rewind brief, I have to create a 60 second video showing off the completed environment. This was my first time using the new Unreal Engine sequencer. I encountered several problems when using it. I recorded the sequence as a series of .jpg images but it resulted in some strange texture popping. I also noticed that the crosshair was still visible, albeit almost unnoticeable. The sequence took about 2 hours to render.

Finished Video:

I was able to edit the camera angles together within the sequencer in Unreal Engine. I found it was a little clunky overall and I ultimately had to bring the final video into Adobe Premiere for some clean up. However I am interested in trying this again with my Red Chases Blue scene from Semester A, hopefully with more success.

Saturday - Unreal Engine GDC 2018

This Saturday I had some fun tuning into the "State of Unreal" presentation at the 2018 Game Developers Conference and was completely blown away by the technical and visual mastery on display throughout the conference.

As someone who is relatively new to the field of real-time graphics, I must say that the gap in quality between real-time graphics and traditional rendering methods seems to have gotten so small. Factoring in the speed at which real-time graphics can display complex imagery, it becomes apparent that game engines have a lot of potential to revolutionise the field of 3D content creation.

I was particularly impressed with the "Reflections Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo" segment. This is a tech demo video demonstrating the photo realistic visual reflections created within Unreal Engine 4. This serves as a solid example of visual effects that now rival those seen in big budget films. With results this impressive, I'm eager to improve my own visual results with Unreal Engine.

So far I'm still finding it quite difficult to achieve a photo-realistic look for my environment. I think it looks fine but noticeable "gamey". I am planning to utilise what I have learnt throughout this brief and apply it to my major project development.

Unreal Engine (2018) State of Unreal | GDC 2018 | Unreal Engine [Online Video] March 28th. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwKeLsTG12A&t=319s [Accessed: 24th March 2018]