Foliage

One of main new areas which I chose to look at for this project was foliage. The main foliage I needed were trees, as these feature heavily in my environment. If there is time towards the end of this project, I would also like to create a bush and some grass to line the track, however these are by no means essential.

My first attempts at creating a tree didn’t work very well. The leaves on the tree didn’t seem to fit right, and didn’t make the top of the tree look dense enough to be real. I realised that this was because the leaf planes I had created to flat and uniformly shaped which meant they created an unnaturally shaped tree. To help fix this problem, I looked at a few example of tree models online.

At looking at these I modelled a new leaf plane, which was more curved and unevenly shaped. I also created two smaller variants, each of which has a slightly different layout of leaves on it. The new version of the tree which I created using the improved leaf planes looked much better. The curved leaf planes gave the tree the volume which the first version had been lacking, making it look much nicer.  The only problem I did have was placing the leaf planes in a way which gave the tree a realistic shape.  Because of the way I had modelled the leaf planes, my first attempts at the tree ended up looking too spherical. To counteract this, I took some of the smaller pieces and placed these near perpendicular to the larger leaf planes. After a few attempts placing, repositioning and then adding more of these I finally managed to break up the outline of the tree enough to make it look more natural.

 

The biggest issue I found was getting the leaves on the tree to light correctly. Each leaf plane was only lit on one side, and they were all lit individually rather than in a way that was consistent to each other. Eventually, I was able to find a solution online. The fix involved creating half a sphere and stretching it to cover the whole tree. Next I selected the sphere, followed by the tree. Then by using transfer attributes, you can make the tree light based off of the normals of the sphere. This make the leaves light as a single mass, giving them a more uniform appearance.

Overall I pretty pleased with the tree I created, and was happy with the way it looked when I put it in the UE4 scene. Unfortunately, the tree was the only piece of foliage which I had time to create for this project. If I had more time to work on this project, or was to ever go back to it I would also look at creating some bushes and some grass which would like the edge of the track.

Alpha Presentation and Blockout Feedback

In week 8, we did our alpha presentations, which featured the cinematic at alpha stage, which can be viewed here, https://youtu.be/sTVpPGdMo_0.

The main work between the blockout and the alpha presentations was the modelling work on both the car, and the track. By the alpha presentation, I had finished modelling the majority of the props for the track, with only models that needed finishing being a couple of signs. At this stage I also had about half most of the textures completed for the environment. The texture would which was remaining were the on a couple of the barriers, the signs and a few tweaks to the texture on the track itself. Up to the alpha stage, the majority of the time I’d spent modelling was focused on the environment. I had decided that the best way of organising my time was to get the majority of the environment work out of the way, so that I spend as much time as possible towards the end on the car. Up to alpha I had put some more time into the car, further refining the overall shape of the car, as well as modelling the wheel, and some other details, such as the spoiler and rear of the car. However, as you can see in the video, I hadn’t yet created a texture for it.

One of the main pieces of feedback I received from my blockout presentation was the in the cinematic, I didn’t show enough of the car. The blockout presentation contains a lot of shots of the track, panning across the chicane section three times. When the car is eventually shown, there are only two shots of it and neither of them shows the car particularly close up. Because the car isn’t shown close enough, or for enough time, the detail on it won’t be shown off well.

Based on this feedback, I completely reworked the cameras for the alpha version of the cinematic. I cut out most of the shots of the track at the beginning, leaving a single camera shot which moves along the track, shows off the chicane and then comes to rest on the side of the track. I also improved the camera shots as the car passes through the chicane. I added two cameras, which simply track the car as it passes through the chicane. These improved cameras are much smoother, as rather than animating them to turn; I set them to just follow the car mesh. They also give a much better view of the car. I also created three new cameras on the car itself. Two of these are facing forward, one on the side and one on top, and the third looking backwards at the spoiler. These three cameras help to show off some of the detail on the car, but also provide a good sense of speed as the environment is seen rushing past the car.

Another piece of feedback I received from the blockout presentation was that my original concept, of making a night scene, would take away from the actual modelling work. Because of this, I decided to change the scene to more of an evening scene. By adding more sunlight into the scene, it lit up both the track and the car better, which showed much more detailed that would otherwise have been visible. By adding sunlight to the scene, it also meant some really nice shadows were created where the sun shines through the trees. These shadows look really good both on the track, and on the car as it passed by the trees.

The mains things which I have left to do before the final presentation are to finish the last textures in the environment, and then to work on the car. The car needs a lot of modelling work, before I am then able to UV map it, before finally creating the texture for it. There are also I couple of things which I would like to look at including if there is time towards the end. These are visual effects and the creation of more foliage, however, these will only be looked at if there is enough time available once the modelling work is completed.