New Job

Hola my friends,

If you hadn't heard I started a new job at Microsoft this Monday the 12th as a QA Tester.  It's the ground floor of the games industry but it IS the games industry so I'm quite excited!  I will be focusing on learning my job there for now and wanted to leave a record here as to why my blog entry frequency has suddenly taken a nose dive.  Now you know  :)

Thanks for your patience and support and I hope that what you've read here so far has been inspiring and informative!

Unity vs. Unreal assets and their lighting problems

Hola folks!  As you know we went from Unity to Unreal 4 and we knew there was going to be some updating.  My biggest concern was getting our lighting to start working because it is going to be very important for our environment to light well both from in game light sources but also from the characters combat VFX that we have planned.

So when we brought our Unity modular pieces into Unreal and started messing with static lighting we found some pretty big problems.

Our original modular wall pieces

This was the result of baking out lightmaps in Unreal with those pieces

What ha-hap-happened was Unreal reads separate pieces of geometry as having AO between the pieces, no matter how close they are -- these are snapped together on the grid.  It also made me realize how much these walls don't look like a cave which is the initial environment the player finds him/herself in.  Instead they come off as concrete barrier pieces at a construction site.  There is also more baking at the base of the pieces where the floor plane meets.  Pretty ugly.

So with this I decided, first, to make more organic looking walls and appear more like they were carved out of a cave to create a temple type structure and, second, to make our 16x16 tile pieces solid geometry with as few seams between pieces as possible.  The fewer seams I have the less I'll have to hide with assets, decals and vertex painting.

The new modular floor and wall pieces are broken down into individual rooms and then compiled by our original naming convention: Lvl1F1T1(R1)

Still some lighting issues but nothing that can't be fixed!

So a quick rundown on the rebuilt assets.  As I mentioned before, once I brought the original walls into Unreal from Unity I realized they looked like crap.  This time I wanted to make them more organic and cave like that was carved and then smoothed by air and time.  So I started messing with the CV curve tool and lofting to create surfaces.  I finally ended up with 1 wall piece and 1 each outer and inner 90 degree corner. Shortly after I modeled a carved lightsource wall section -- all using the same original curve to maintain edgeloop continuity.

New modular wall pieces

I also created some better arch pieces and pillars to fit the new roomier level layout

To avoid having light baking issues like before, I decided to make the levels out of water-tight pieces of geometry.  Once my walls were setup, I used the Cut Faces tool in Maya to divvy up the original 16x16 plane

And the slicing begins

After that it was just a matter of fitting together, combining, welding, and edgeflow efficiency.

Total faces just over 5200.  I'm planning on revisiting these pieces to optimize as I get further in the project.  Until then I'm gonna hammer out some lighting, asset placement, and begin planning some VFX for the combat system currently being developed.  For now I'm pretty happy with the progress of this level piece from the original and am looking forward to putting together the rest of the pieces to see the level start to take more form.  Hoorah!