SANM 560 - Week 7

We really bucked up and put in the work this week. It was all hands-on deck at this point and required a lot of constant communication between all sides to make sure everything worked smoothly. Our load test on Thursday was a bit rocky; we still didn't have the whole left section textured and production design was not able to bring in any of their props yet. I handed over lighting to Danci so she could work on optimization as I had become quite busy managing the tech and UE team. There was a constant back and forth and answering questions on who was doing what, what looked good, what still needed to be done, and checking in on peoples' assignments. I became extremely vigilant on Slack, checking it almost every time I opened my phone and even when I would wake throughout the night. I sent Carlos the train model with the transformations baked, it was very low poly though and found out it had nanite activated on it which automatically gives it a lower LOD. Turning this off allowed me to get the full poly model. I gathered new foliage and sent it over to Mia, the Greens person from production design and got approval. I had to go through each asset make sure it was the right size, rotation, make sure the pivot point was at the bottom, and separate it from other meshes if it was all combined. I desaturated a lot of the textures as requested and made sure the wind was kept to a minimum. I then organized it into neat little files that I could easily transfer over to the main project file. I troubleshooted how to bring foliage over from one level to another because I was having lots of issues with that since the instancedfoliageactor is tied to the geometry of a scene and not its own separate actor. I tried turning it into a static mesh, transferring it outside of Unreal in File Explorer, and transferring it via sublevels. The latter ended up being the answer, but I needed a bit of guidance from Prof to figure that out. I added new foliage, one section or plant type group at a time. I find this allows me to really pick and choose the appropriate areas for where certain plants would go. I tried to focus the flowers on the brighter areas while the mushroom went in shaded areas. Tall grasses in cracks and corners where the platform may have split or broken away. I also added in more debris to the left side of the middle platform as requested, desaturating some of the bright red pieces and getting rid of some weird outstanding pieces. I also added more paper, food cans, and human trash such as bags, cardboard boxes, fuel cans, and general supplies. Once these were in I added in posters to the walls, scattering them across the floor and areas where humans were able to reach. We only had 4 of these so it was a delicate balance of not repeating them too much where it was too noticeable. I also added in the remaining photogrammetry and placed it in the scene in areas that needed more fill to help blend the physical and virtual set. Danci added in sublevels and I didn't have the project set up right and so it looked like all my work was gone, but she showed me and I asked her to make a tutorial for the other changes and tools she made so me and other people could understand them better and use them more efficiently. Professor was thankfully able to secure us another LOD test on Tuesday. The team still wasn't happy with the small and large arch pieces that were kit bashed. Birdie offered to model them both tonight so that they could be textured and replaced. Once she had the small arch in I replaced all 48+ of them in the scene. Final textures were assigned and the final pieces were finally coming together. It was a long week with many late nights but it turned out so worth it.