Week Thirty something.... Off the Map
Off the map. I mean wow 2 more weeks and its over and well I've never been so conflicted with a project during my time on the course. I cant tell if I have subtly improved upon skills I had touched upon on the prior project or I've stagnated. Anyway during the course of the Easter I spent the 3 weeks refining my bakes, texturing and just general asset building for the level itself. It's going to be a big slideshow but here is my progression from week 24 so if my maths is correct that would make this week, week 27.
Between asset creation I have had a hand in set dressing which from my experience is harder than it seems as I have spent a while battling with making the map visually interesting as well as easy for the player to navigate. Its quite difficult as well trying to design the map for a casual audience coming from a dedicated gaming background. Things that may seem easy to me may be difficult for the every man and since this project is part of a competition for the public ease of use must be taken in consideration. In addition during the easter break I started to learn more about the limits of Normals as you can see in the low poly version of my caliban sculpt which doesnt retain as miuch detail as the high poly. To achieve this level of detail one may need more tris on the low poly as alot of the forms are washed out.
In addition the noisy nature of the textures itself cause problems with reading the normals As I found nosy elements such as moss can have an affect on normals details.
A result of this forced me to bake my AO's onto the diffuse of my character sculpts to make sure the facial details are not lost.
Other than that I have been managing admin duties such as making sure the group blog is on schedule. Its been a tough project but things are starting to come together.Hopefully I can keep my cool if things go wrong in the future.
