Evaluation/Review

Introduction

Over the course of the year, I managed to keep on track with this project with constant updates throughout. This lead to me having plenty of time towards the end allowing me to add in more detail and models to the final version. There was only one stage of the Dissertation where I went slightly off track with time, setting me back a couple of weeks, but soon caught up again, and went past what I was intentionally going to make as I had a lot of time left over. Making the village turned out exactly how I wanted it to, and since I wanted to work on lighting for the scene too, I spent a lot of time looking up different ways and methods of how to achieve this. Since I was aiming for a sunrise/sunset timezone, I needed the colours in the scene to match how they would in real life, as well as how the shadows would appear.

Time Management

When planning out the year, it's very difficult to work out exactly how long certain areas will take. This therefore lead some deadlines going slightly astray and getting completed on time. Not only that, but other projects were constantly on the go as well, leaving me with less time to work on it. But once everything had been completed, I could work on this all the time. Even though I knew time was creeping up on me and I was getting further away from the stages I needed to be at according to my proposal, I made sure that I never drifted too far away and that I could always catch up to where I should be fairly easily. Other than that, everything went well and managed to complete everything before planned, giving me more time to work on other areas. Since I was only planning on making the village, and being able to run around it in Unity, finishing early gave me time to make the Unity version look a lot better by giving the scene trees, terrain, plants, skybox and most importantly the lighting from the sun.

Research

Through all the research that I had acquired before texturing the models, made it much easier to come to a decision as to how everything was going to look without having to make it up from scratch. However with the windows, I found looking through certain games, they are often kept quite simple and all followed the same sort of style. A window that contained a cross and that was it, so I thought it was best to go for this idea too as this window idea proved effective in my work as well. Since I wasn't going to make the inside of my houses, I decided to keep my windows black on both 3ds Max and Unity simply because I didn't want the player to be able to see through them, and black proved to look the best.

Other than that, plenty of research went into different areas of the models I was creating giving me plenty of ideas on how everything should be designed and made, and how it could look once textured allowing me to constantly work on my dissertation with ease.

Conceptual Art

Making the drawings (as simple as they were) allowed me to begin making the models at the very beginning straight away. However as I began making the initial ideas, I felt as though they didn't look as good as I'd hoped in 3D and to me looked too similar to some modern day cottages. So I decided to redesign them to something that looked a little more medieval and began work on remaking them.

All other concepts weren't altered, except the wagon. Rather than having 4 wheels, I decided it should only have 2 as again more carts/wagons in game tended to have only 2 wheels so i wanted to follow suite. There were some models that I'd made that I didn't draw up first, but these were just the models I made at the very end of this project that I thought of adding in at the last minute.

3ds Max

Texturing again as always proved to be the most time consuming part, and since I wanted to do it properly, made it take even longer. But this gave a really good result at the end, making all the time spent doing it pay off. Making the models themselves didn't take a great deal of time however some areas took much longer than others e.g. the houses where quite difficult, trying to make sure they all had proper geometry where all vertices are connected to each other. 

Lighting through 3ds Max looked very effective. For this, I used the Daylight feature as this gave me the perfect form of lighting I needed. Through this feature, you can choose what time of year you want the sun to be in, which positions it for you in the sky so of course choosing January would make the sun much lower as to if it were in August etc. As well as choosing what time of day it was, and where in the world the sun is e.g. which country.

All textures applied to the models always had bump and specular maps added to them to really bring the models to life and make them look a lot more realistic and 3D. This was done simply by making  greyscaled versions of the textured and slighting increasing the contrast between the lighter and darker areas. Lighter areas contain more bump and specular amounts.

Unity

Since I was still quite unfamiliar with Unity, I had to fully get to grips as to how t use the program again properly before I could really get on with anything. This didn't take a huge amount of time so I could soon get on with it. When everything was imported, and I could run around the scene, I found a few areas that were either not textured, or didn't texture correctly. Since there were so many small and tiny areas on the models, made it very difficult to textured every single tiny area until you can actually move around the scene seeing what the player will actually see. These problems were soon fixed simply by editing them in max and saving over the FBX version in the Unity folder. 

Once all that was done, I really wanted to make the scene more of a scene by adding in a terrain, a beach/sea, trees and bushes, and a skybox. I then decided to make a few more models for the scene such as a Jetty for the beach, a boat in which the player can start on, a small river with a bridge, a way post to show the direction in which the player must run to reach the village. This made the village feel more like a village, and rather than being at it from the very beginning, I wanted the player to explore a little before actually getting there. But there was still something important missing, sound. To really make the scene feel more realistic and interesting, it really need sound effects. So I started off by adding sound to the sea, followed by gentle cracking of a fire as you run past, onto a river flowing by and a waterfall in the distance. Birds singing as you run down the forest path, and once at the village, birds in the background still but with the sounds from the furnace, the smelter and the well. The scene needed just one more feature after this.

The lightsource for the sun. To really add depth to the scene, it needed proper lighting. This was probably one of the most time consuming areas of the whole project due to the time it took to either read up on how to do it, how to get a certain effect etc. But unfortunately there wasn't a huge amount of information out there about it, and some that I did find said completely different things to others. So the only way to find out how to light my scene properly was through trial and error. Due to the fact that light mapping proved to be VERY long to render made it very difficult to really test in great detail. As soon as certain settings were turned up slightly too much, render the light map would change from 10 minutes, to 2 hours. This became very annoying as I couldn't really find out what settings needed to be where to get the effect I wanted just from changing the settings a little at a time, then waiting 2 hours. Even with low settings, the rendering time often jumped drastically up in time once something was set too high. And this was only on a couple of objects! But I managed to get a pretty good result that I'm happy with apart from how the fruit actually turned out.

The character needed a script that allowed him to have footstep sound effects that played when running on different grounds to add authenticity to his movement. This proved to be very difficult since I'm not too good on the coding side, but eventually it was resolved and worked perfectly. The final detail I added in was an animation for the boat. Rather than just sitting on the sea not doing anything, not looking very realistic, I added an animation that simply made the boat rock up and down. Since the player starts off here too, you need to get the feel for it when sitting on the boat. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, I'm very happy with how everything turned out, and by keeping good time management I managed to get everything done nicely on time at kept it all at a high standard giving the end result of the scene a very good one. Even though my course has come to an end, I will still keep this project going and probably keep this blog going as I continue to make progress to this scene over the coming weeks/months/years and hopefully make it more into a fully working game if I can get my head around scripting!

Final Update - Medieval Village/Avela

Everything is now complete, with everything being final rendered  and light mapped. Which took many hours! Everything had be light mapped several times before I could obtain the optimised results. 

First - light mapping took 9 and a half hours, where a blue screen appeared resulting in a failed attempt.

Second try - Started light mapping at 9:30pm, checked it in the morning at 9am and it had completed however nothing had changed!

Third try - Set everything the light mapping quality to low but kept the same settings and took 4 hours but the game proved too laggy to really play through nicely.

Forth try - took only 12 minutes once all settings were lowered to their minimum where the game could play much better but didn't look very good at all compared to before

Fifth try, settings improved, contrast between shadows increased to make up for the reduction in Ambient Occlusion as this proved too much for the game making it lag a lot. Brightness for the skylight was slightly increased to show the difference between the light and shadows much clearer. Turned out well, but due to the low quality settings, it still didn't look good enough at all. All shadows were very jaggy, hard and unrealistic. This render took 20 minutes.

Final render - Settings were kept the same, but this render took a lot longer simply because it was rendered at high quality. Took an overall time of 2 hours - nothing compared to the first try! I think I set the settings way too high which is why the blue screen occurred the first time - it was simply too much for the computer to handle. (and its a very high spec PC.) The settings I set where based on what other people had used in many different tutorials I had been looking at.

The final version can be seen below, some with low quality, to compare against the high quality.

Low Quality - High Settings: Gives deep shadows but less difference between light and shadow.

High Quality - Mid Settings: More contrast, less shadow but smoother and blended.

Another example of the changes in lighting.

Again, the light is much more visible from the sun, giving a more realistic feel to the scene.

This is where you can begin to see a big difference between low and high quality settings

As you can see, the quality is much better, with blended shadows, and they aren't jagged.

One last example - showing more light, quality and contrast.

And the huge decrease in Ambient Occlusion - doesn't look quite as good, but plays 10x better.

Remaining screen shots for the rest of the scene:

Everything turned out really well with my scene, and I'm really happy with the results considering that I knew very little on lighting at the beginning of this project. I did encounter one slight problem when it came to lighting however, and no matter what I tried, I could not resolve the problem and don't really understand why it appeared incorrectly.

Low Quality - High Settings: The shadows on the fruit look all right here.

High Quality - Mid Settings: But here, strange things start to happen with the high quality settings.

 

Due to the long light mapping times, trying to fix this can take a very long time, especially when not knowing what the actual problem is. This problem I know is not affected by the textured map from 3ds Max as it has a simple Spherical mesh.

3D Modelling - Latest Update (06/05/2012)

Many changes have been made to my work in Unity - Some models modified with textures, tweaks and remakes to make them fit their environment better.

Improvements to the Unity map

Sound has now been implemented including

1. Birds
2. Sea
3. Fire
4. Water
5. River
6. Footsteps - Wood and Sand
7. Wind

Collision Meshes

This is to stop players from being able to run outside of the map and keeping them heading in the right direction. These meshes cannot be seen, so that they do not affect the scenery in any way. They simply stop the player from being able to progress any further

New Lighting

Having the right kind of lighting is essential in bringing a level to life. It helps create the overall atmosphere of the scene and makes everything look more dramatic and gives the player the feeling of actually being there. Lights have also now been added to the lamps.

Bugs and fixes to models and textures

Improve the final quality of the scene making sure it's at a very high standard and fixing any areas that were perhaps missed when texturing the first time.

New Skybox

Again, essential for creating the atmosphere of the scene and makes the scene look a lot more dramatic.

Code

The boat in the level bobs up and down when level has been entered to make the player feel as though they are on a boat.

Code has been added to the player so that when the player runs around the level, different sounds will be played depending on what surface they are running on.

Final Thoughts

Everything is now very near completion and all that is really left to do now is add in finer details to make the scene more of a scene from a game, and not a scene where models have simply been placed into a games engine and that's it. 

One thing I know that's left to do is to add an animation to the boat to allow it to bob in the water, and not just the character on the boat through code.

Below are different lighting effects used in 3ds Max, and the updated Unity project with its new lighting and skybox.

And lighting style number 2..

Lighting on the second set I feel looks much better than the first, so I decided to aim for something similar to this in Unity. These are the results.