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Reflective Essay

When I started this unit, I was a bit lost and did not really know how to research artist properly. I had to find an artist and make a level design based upon their interpretation of the world and make it reflect their ideas. I struggled to adapt artists works into a 3D environment without them becoming too much like a glorified art gallery. Eventually I managed to find an artist who’s work I found interesting to incorporate into an environment: as textures, and a layout.

When finalising upon a concept and developing a white-box of my world, I incorporated the artists visual style into the very layout and blueprint of my environment. I believe this worked better as it allowed me to build upon a world where the core blueprint and floor plan was the artists work. This made it easier to incorporate themes, textures and objects into the environment without making it a glorified gallery. I realise the idea of creating a maze from the artists work seems maybe cliche and an obvious conclusion after looking at the artists visuals, but I am confident that I have incorporated enough originality, my own interpretation and the artists visual aesthetic into the world to make it standout. 

In execution, my textures seemed much better in concept. I could create an almost seamless texture from the artists work however, when converting the texture into a normal map, the seams became more obvious and visible due to shading, and the environment began to look tiled. This did not ruin the atmosphere, it just made the maze seem less naturally constructed which did detract slightly from the organic nature of the artists work. 

To make up for this, I managed to cement more of the artists themes in other areas, such as the sound work. For the level music and sound effects, I tried to create a soundtrack in a way I thought the artist himself would create. His works are made form rock and stone, and depict natural occurring patterns and organic structures. So for the music I used music created by rocks (wind blowing through rocky caves and ringing rocks). This helped to pull the theme of nature and organic matter together. I got these ideas based upon feedback from the lecturers and peers. My own interpretation and feelings of the artists work were also incorporated into the world. The artists visual works and how his sculptures look and are presented, make me feel uneasy. The works look alien and out of place, but oddly blend in well and this makes me feel uncomfortable. which is why i made the environment atmospheric and oppressive with the fog and lighting, towering walls and narrow, stretched corridors. 

Overall I think I have succeeded in creating an environment that captures the tone of my chosen artist. However I feel I could have managed my time better. I spent too much time trying to fix UV mapping that it effectively stopped me from producing more textures and sculptures to incorporate into the environment. I originally wanted each area to have a different texture based upon the artists work, but ultimately my environment and all the objects and assets had the same texture and became too repetitive. This did work to an extent though as mazes are rather uniform in design.

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The good, the bad, the ugly.

Before I do my end of unit review, I want to look back through my blog and explain why I have made decisions and where I have dropped in quality dueto a variety of reasons.

The good: For the most part I managed to build my environment to resemble my concept idea and successfuly recreate his patterns into my mazes structure. My normal maps are convincing and resemble the imbedded rock patterns of my artists work. I have created a huge environment which grounds the themes of the atmosphere his work made me feel, combined with his organic and repetetive patterns. I have successfully managed to learn and experiment with blueprinting, to create new textures, normal maps, make textures glow in the dark using a normal map, trigger boxes and interactive elements. The rooms with the sculptures in are atmospheric and they look pretty in the environment (especially the glowing red sculptures), lit up in the light and with the particle affects. I have successfully managed to incorporate the artist in various ways. For the texture of the walls I used one of his very own patterns, and converted them into a normal map. I did not recreate any of his sculptures, but I created some sculptures that bare a resemblance to his work and I presented them within the environment (mostly) in a similar way to how Peter would photograph and display his work. I have incorporated the very patterns of his work into the structure of my world in the layout of the maze; I have incorporated my own interpretation of his art into my work by capturing the atmosphere and emotion his work makes me experience (albeit exaggerated). I even managed to incorpote the artist via audio. When talking to my lecturer, he told me to think about what I think the artist would use for audio if he was to make a game, so I used music created by rocks (wind whistling through a rocky cave, sonorous rocks that ring when they have been struck). This helped the solidify the organic structure and view of my world and I hopefully have captured the world and ideas of the artist successfully. The Bad: Whilst I managed to capture the artists patterns in the maze, I only succeeded to create a maze structure on two of his designs as opposed to my original idea of 3. Due to time constraints, I had to scrap the third pattern idea and just opted to replace it with a repeat of the first section. I did however add a ramp and a blueprint platform to this area though. The different areas were also meant to be textured differently to make them contrast more against eachother. I only manged to create one texture out of Peters work as I took a long time trying to make his work seamless and then I had to learn how to create a normal map in photoshop. This time consumption has lead to my enviornment being very easy to leave the viewer bored as they are left experiencing the same texture over and over again. This did however sort of help to support my idea of the repetition and also helped in making the maze feel like a maze. Mazes are repetetive. Due to only managing to get one normal map done, this meant a lot of the sculptures textures I had originally planned for had to be scrapped.

I also accidentally created the world as a 3rd person character. The brief calls for 1st person. This meant I had to either restart or convert my player into 1st person. I managed to mimic 1st person view via editing the character blueprint and cameraboom position. This sadly left the movements mildly glitchy. If I looked up too much the character mesh would become visible through the camera.

The Ugly: After converting my seamless texture into a normal map is when the seams began to stand out more. My texture wasnt that seamless. This sadly left my walls to not align up and have very visible seams like slabs on the walls. Overall this seems to be overlooked. In order for my environment interior to be realistically dark enough for a character to be weilding a torch, I removed the sky box. This made the outside no longer bright and had to be lit up with lights. I managed to make the final environment and sculpture look pretty, however the darkess of the outside ruined the contrast between the freedom of the outside world and the cramped dark maze. Sadly I couldnt work out how to make the skylight not go through my objects and stop lighting up the interior of my maze. Despite having a complex maze design for the most part, this made uv unwrapping a hell. In the end I had to settle for auto uv unwrap, which allowed for my textures/maps to be consistent in size along the walls. This did sadly hinder my ability to have multiple textures per area. I originally wanted the display rooms to have the same red glowing walls as some of my sculptures. If I tried to uv unwrap all the walls and floor, the textures would end up pointing in different directions, becoming stretched and hideous. I did successfully manage to map the floor and walls of one display room and the textures were magnificent for that zone, but the rest of the objects walls outside the room were messed up. The constant uv unwrapping for every individual wall in the maze was heavily time consuming. It took me 3 weeks to be able to get the walls to look reasonable when textured. In hindsight I should have left it at auto earlier and this would have gave me more time to create new sculptures and maps/textures and create more blueprints.

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My 1st person run through of the maze.

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https://freesound.org/people/dslrguide/sounds/321488/ Stone slab/lift sound used for the lift and rotating sculpture

https://freesound.org/people/Royal/sounds/17729/ Cavern wind used for the camera flythrough

https://freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/76393/ The ambience I used for the maze character walkthrough. This ambience fits into the theme of the artist as it is edited audio of wind in a cave and it creates a very organic atmosphere to the music. With this sound as a backdrop I felt I could make the maze and the textured walls feel more alive and organic. For the level music I edited and altered the song in the youtube video that used sonorous rocks. For a placeholder music it works. If I were to produce a real game I would have to ensure the music was created by entirely royalty free music and sound such as the other examples above. I would love to have visited the the rocks or similar rocks and recreated my own sounds. I could have even hired a tascam and experimented creating sound effects and recording sounds of rocks and vibrations. But I did not think about music until it was too late.

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Now with sound.

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I eventually found some good example of what these rocks can sound like. I think for the flythrough I will use music similar to the video, or even spliced from the video. I will mix music like this in with atmospheric or ambient sound like cave wind. Overall this would be for the flythrough video. If it was in the game world it would maybe detract from the atmosphere that I was hoping to capture.

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For soundtrack I researched into sonorous rocks. Overall, whilst they sound fun, they don’t really work for the atmosphere in this environment. Sadly aswell, the only examples of actual sonorous rock sounds I could find were off a low quality video of people banging the rocks with hammers, or a piece of music which would cost 70+ dollars to be able to download.

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I tried to do the same method of a level sequence when using my character. 

To do the camera shots in unreal engine, I had to create a camera, attatch each camera to a level sequence. I would then use the timeline, drag and adjust the position of the camera along the timeline and keyframe it. When rendering, i rendered the camera footage out as image sequences (JPG) in 1080p.

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To do the camera shots in unreal engine, I had to create a camera, attatch each camera to a level sequence. I would then use the timeline, drag and adjust the position of the camera along the timeline and keyframe it. When rendering, i rendered the camera footage out as image sequences (JPG) in 1080p.

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With this blueprint I managed to adjust the camera and boom to rotate with the character as I turned the mouse. To do this, I followed a youtube tutorial. I had to adjust the position of the camera by adjusting the cameraboom target arm length to zero. I dragged the boom to just in front of the characters face and then used the blue print from the youtube video to allow the camera to rotate with the mouse and character. Sadly, the youtube tutorial only used ‘use controller rotation yaw’ which worked along the x axis, but looking up and down made the camera go through the character and floor. It would also make the camera see through walls if I got to close. Adding the extra blueprint ‘use controller rotation pitch’ fixed the problem.

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Updated version with higher resolution and better lighting

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I had made the first play through in 3rd person. i realise now it has to be in first person. I am keeping the 3rd person run through as a backup however in case I do not have the time to correct my mistake, or if it ends up corrupting or breaking by mistake.

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practising with the camera matinee to make a video. I will be using this method to do the camera sweeps of the environment

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Screenshot of my blueprint to make the objects start to rotate and follow the character

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Sonorous rocks

Sonorous rocks are rocks and stones that make sound and ring like bells when struck or dropped, or if wind blows past them.

These are natural organic sound produced by rocks and I feel would work well to support my artists theme in my environment if I incorporated it via diegetic sound or non diegetic soundtrack

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Feedback

strengthening my connection to the artist.

After getting feedback from Paul, I was told it would be good if I did more to link to my artist. My work currently links and the level design works, but it is only obvious after I explain why the maze is layed out how it is. To strengthen my ideas and the artist work in my environment, I should think about how the artist would do the rest of the environment, such as the sound effects.

Since my artist sculptures are mostly with stone and rock, I should try and use that for the sound. Peter Randall-Pages works are organic in structure so i should make the audio organic too.