Common Art Sprint #5

 Common Art Sprint #5

For this week I made certain all of my 3D assets were up to date with any finishing texture modifications in the new lighting that has been developed to make sure everything looks copasetic. I noticed that for some reason the nightstand texture was not working, so I discussed with Desiree and we decided to unlink it from its drawer and then I was able to get the texture updated. Overall I am pleased with how the assets I worked on look in the space, especially the lamp because I feel like it is one of the focal points in the room and really illuminates the space and creates a realistic VR experience:

For audio I worked extensively with Manny to get all of the levels correct and make sure everything was working like a well-oiled machine. The main difficulty was the Anton Threat track which has Anton's voice. I think this track could still be boosted in  ways, but the problem with the technology is that the Oculus woofers have no bass - there is not a very good way to get lower resonating sound frequencies, it is almost like using a pair of ear buds. It might be beneficial to write the company and do research to figure out why that is the case. I will say the speakers that are in the current device are my biggest hang-up with creating immersive experiences in VR right now. Sound is at least half or maybe 75% of the experience, and without better equipment, modifying the wavs to fit the device will help, but it will only take it so far.

Overall I think our virtual reality world has great sound and feels immersive, there are a few minor adjustments that could be made such as attenuating or localizing the Front Desk sound to the receiver but myself or Manny will need to do research into how to program certain details like that.

Common Art - Lighting Corpse Bride

 Common Art - Lighting Corpse Bride

For our lighting project we were given the interior scene from the Corpse Bride VR project and given free reign to creating lighting as we saw fit. I really liked the glowing dust effect the team already had in the room, so I decided to keep only that element.

In terms of adding light I started from scratch, added a dim skylight, one directional light, one spotlight over Emily at the piano, exponential height fog, post processing volume, sphere capture and then used point lights to create the look I wanted:

I wanted to draw the viewers eye to Emily, so I kept most of the lighting soft but strong enough to create some shadows and depth to the screen shot I wanted to create. I was able to use low point lights over the table tops to create some light and break up the darkness in places. I wanted kind of a purple red above as if maybe there is a fireplace up on that level.

I like how I achieved sort of a silhouette effect around Emily since she is the main event in the scene. I also used some orange lights in the next images to create something like torchlight on the walls, and I think if I were going to add anything to this scene it would be just a few torches hanging on the walls like a type of sconce just to have a place for where the light is coming from, or maybe a large chandelier - even so, I think the room design is beautiful and just needs an object or two to give a reason why the light is there:

I also added a rectangular light to try and draw out the bone design on the front of the bar because I thought those details looked really cool and just needed some highlight to bring them out.

Common Art - Sprint #4

Common Art - Sprint #4

For this sprint I worked on lighting the Corpse Bride VR project and then making sure my 3D assets were up to date as well as the audio files:

Lamp

Rack

Nightstand

Dresser

Painting

I also spent time double checking my finalized audio tracks and next week I plan to get with Manny to make sure everything is hitting how it supposed to in our VR experience:

Sprint #4 - Audio asset adjustments:

- Gun Load sounds good, nice and strong

- Lamp Switch might need to boost this if the new Quiet Ambient track is louder = DONE

- Quiet Ambient need to revise this track, have car sounds in back louder = DONE

- Gun Shot also sounds good works well in Oculus

- Phone Ring good balance and position

- Pneumatic may need to adjust based on gameplay = DONE

Common Art - Sprint #3

 Common Art - Sprint #3

Sprint #3 - June 25 - Nightstand game res / UVs + textures (audio see below)

For this week my tasks I worked on the Nightstand game res / UVs and textures. I created some dust and stains on the surface because people have been putting items on it for a long time. I wanted to add some water stains like someone left their iced beverage on it without a coaster, because they wouldn't really care about the nightstand, or they are having some alcoholic beverages and forget, the hotel is old and not kept up very well. I was able to get some marks and the cup water stains just faint enough using duplicate overlay layers:

Sprint #3 - Audio: For the audio this week I needed to adjust the following:

- Anton Threat track needs 5 seconds or so of ambient noise for Cat Death to play out = DONE

- Dial Tone level of decibels could be bumped up 5% = DONE

- Front Desk remove '5 Minutes' words etc to make sense in VR experience = DONE

- Cat Death needs Meow at beginning cranked up 25% also hissing cranked up 25% = DONE

- Ring Tone sounds good, nice and clear and panning angle feels good

- Gun Cock also sounds good, nice balance

Common Post - No Country Sprint Schedule

 Common Post - No Country Spring Schedule

To expedite our VR experience for No Country we are breaking down the assets that need to be complete by July 9th 2021. For the first sprint I will be coming up with a timeline schedule to complete the assets I am responsible for. The items in our VR experience I am responsible for are as follows:

Audio Asset: sprint #1 & #2 goals will be assessing sound quality inside Oculus and taking notes. Since the audio assets are further along, I plan to make a final pass on those after completing the 3D assets. My goal with the audio assets is to doing any final vocal recording edits during sprint #3 & #4, and to have all assets finalized by sprint #5 and in engine.

Lamp & Rack: Sprint #1 & #2 goals include High Res, Game Res, UVs and first texture pass. Nightstand & Dresser: Sprint #3 & #4 goals include High Res, Game Res, UVs and first texture pass. Sprint #5 will create time to work on finalizing Audio and final 3D texture adjustments for the Art Lock. Sprint #6 will be a final look at Lighting / Display.

My 3D Assets are as follows:

Lamp - Rack - Nightstand - Dresser

My Audio Assets are as follows:

Anton Threat - Dial Tone - Front Desk - Cat Death - Ring Tone - Gun Cock

Gun Load - Lamp Switch - Quiet Ambient - Gun Shot - Phone Ring - Pneumatic

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Sprint #1 - May 28 - Lamp game res / UVs + textures (audio see below) - Current Engine State:

Sprint #1 - Lamp

I worked diligently on the Lamp Textures for this week, including extensive work on the lamp shade which proved to be the most difficult. Nick showed me a way to use an emissive channel in Substance to get the light quality of the shade color to have more of a glow, and then I used lines to create a soft grey shadows where the edges etc would be within the shade. Chris mentioned a way to create surface scattering in UE4 so I will ask him more about that next week. Here is my current texture pass for the lamp which I feel I was able to accomplish a lot and get the wood to have that dusty sort of wear of water roughness and the metal pieces to have some disintegrated qualities:

Sprint #1 - Audio: For the audio this week I was able to get with Manny and check levels in the Occulus and take the following notes for audio assets 1 - 6:

- Anton Threat track needs 5 seconds or so of ambient noise to allow the Cat Death to play out.

- Dial Tone level of decibels could be bumped up 5%

- Front Desk voice will need editing to remove '5 Minutes' words etc to make sense in VR experience

- Cat Death needs Meow at beginning cranked up 25% also hissing cranked up 25%

- Ring Tone sounds good, nice and clear and panning angle feels good

- Gun Cock also sounds good, nice balance

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Sprint #2 - June 11 - Rack game res / UVs + textures (audio see below) - Current Engine State:

Sprint #2 - Audio: this sprint I will get in VR and take the following notes for audio assets 7 - 12:

- Gun Load - Lamp Switch - Quiet Ambient - Gun Shot - Phone Ring - Pneumatic -

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Sprint #3 - June 25 - Nightstand game res / UVs + textures (audio see below) - Current Engine State:

Sprint #4 Audio: edit vocal tracks for audio 1-6 and make adjustments

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Sprint #4 - July 09 - Dresser game res / UVs + textures (audio see below) - Current Engine State:

Sprint #4 Audio: edit vocal tracks for audio 7-12 and make adjustments

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Sprint #5 - July 23 - Final Audio & Textures - ART LOCK - Current Engine State: (see images above)

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Sprint #6 - Aug 3 - Final Display / Check Lighting - Current Engine State: (see images above)

No Country Post

 No Country Post

I spent time making sure the audio was integrated in the experience to the highest level I could achieve in terms of mastering and making certain audio assets louder such as the CatDeath per Nick and Chris's request.

At the live presentation over Zoom I noticed that the team Nitin presented for the audio presented clear through my laptop, so for next summer semester I would like to understand how the audio came through clear when in the Oculus for our team, but it did not for any of the other three projects. Since I am heading up the audio for No Country, I think this is vitally important since Chris will eventually release these VR experiences through the conference he is attending in Santa Cruz from my understanding. We need to know how this will impact the experience, whether you are in the Oculus, or not.

I also worked on importing the bed sheet cloth simulation I created as a game res asset into the VR experience because the previous integration of the bed mesh with my new linen cover altered the collision but now there should be a new bed sheet in there as a separate object with its on complex collision.

Common Art No Country

 Common Art No Country

This week I was able to adjust material colors in our VR experience to make it less grey tone throughout the experience. I did some basic material color adjustments to the different assets.

I also did some tech art and made the smoke much more prevalent per Nick's critique and adjusted the Initial Color inside the blueprint and raised one of the variables to make it more prominent and visible in the experience.

I also worked on creating higher res versions of the Lamp and Bed, and the then experimented with the new Zbrush 2021 cloth simulation to start creating bedding for the bed. I also did some work on the lighting to create a dresser light where the ammo will be, and a closet light inside the closet, but we are still working on lighting so I want to check with Roda and Desiree to make sure it is what will work in the scene before pushing those changes:

Outside of these contributions I am still refining audio and splitting different sounds out to create a more holistic experience. I was also able to speak with Rich Grula to gain some more insight about audio and how to implement it into new experiences.

Common VR Project: Final Audio

 Common VR Project: Final Audio

For this past week I was suffering from my back situation and I think we were supposed to complete our individual posts by Sunday because we had an extension due to Manny's absence. I completed several final audio passes including the Front Desk clerk voice over the telephone that will guide the player at the beginning of the experience to know what to do, and a voice imitation of Anton to close out the experience when Anton is approaching the room. These took a substantial amount of time to try and get the accents sounding decent and I feel like they are pretty close and will work with our experience, and make what is supposed to happen actually make sense instead of the player not knowing what to do when they are placed in the room.

I did not include a picture below of the audio tracks in Premiere but you can find the audio in engine in the folder Content / Misc / Audio - "FrontDesk" "AntonThreat" "CatDeath" if you want to listen to what I was able to achieve.

VR Immersive Experience: Sprint Four

VR Immersive Experience: Sprint Four

I created a painting proxy with a frame and canvas and used a capture image from the film to recreate the same painting. Next step will be putting it into engine. Later I will go back and use photoshop to blur out the center line split.

In addition I have been rising certain of the proxy models I chose up to a higher res and game res models focusing on the most crucial assets and so I will continue to work on those more this week.

I also worked extensively on revising some of the sounds and splitting apart audio for the ceiling fan and certain sounds. Next step will be to get them into the engine and work with the team to hook the sounds up. We did run into some time loss for what I could work on in terms of audio during one of the class period because we needed help from Chris and my computer was needed to figure out why files were but not pushed, so now that is fixed, and I am hoping to make up for some of that lost time during this next sprint.

Delivery 3 - VR Video UE4 Notes

 Delivery 3 - VR Video UE4 Notes

Jacob Stone - Common VR notes from Robo Recall

 

One of the most impressive things I learned from the Unreal video is that you can use a shader in your environments to create the impression of 3D reality. As you move side to side or rotate your vision in the Oculus, the illusion of a dimensional space with depth like a 3D cube can be placed on a single plane, thus freeing up processing power. The shader creates the visual effect instead of having actual 3D vert modelling which would make the project run slower.

I also learned a ton about shape language and detail in terms of what as a 3D artist I need to be thinking about when making models. The robot examples showed that you need to be aware of how the person playing the VR game will see in terms of perspective. Each of the robots are different sizes so that they are easily distinguishable. There was a robot designed for speed but shorter than a human, so most of the detail area is what is closest to the VR player eyes. The top of the robot has more interesting detail and design whereas the bottom half of the robot will be less interesting because the player will not be seeing that part of the robot as much as the top side. The inverse is true of the giant big bot, the top of it was very boxy and solid planes but the mid-section of the robot has more detail because that is at the eye level of the player.

Another important distinction made within the VR game that I found insightful is the idea that players who are shooting or killing some enemy within the game prefer that it does not look or feel too human. It turns out even if the enemy is a robot but it has human-like qualities people will not want to play the game or kill as many enemies because they feel bad about doing the action. The VR team was able to get around this issue by making sure the robots felt like robots and added more sinister qualities to enhance the face for instance and keep it feeling as maybe more of an unconscious systematic type killer that way you will not feel bad for slaying these aggressive animatronic atrocities.

It was interesting to learn how they create highly accurate prototype meshes before they get to the high mesh creation. It is sort of like creating the game res model before doing the high res, which is the process I experimented with on my Nerf Gun and have found this type of workflow works best for me because as I’m constructing the proxy my mind is already seeing how I am going to create the kind of topology I will need and how the UVs will layout. This method also allows the animators and designers to have the prototype model in the VR experience sooner so they can immediately see what is and is not working in engine. By getting the game res or prototype model in engine right away the higher res detail that takes time to create can take place after the model is already functioning for the rest of the team.

                My favorite takeaway from the video is easily the concept that the 3D artists used real reference for how they constructed the world. It is in my goal as a 3D artists to approach realism and to be able to work in film in the industry. The way the VR experience was constructed utilized existing architecture to enable the artists to work closely with scale and create accurate representations within the VR world is something I am passionate about. I enjoyed watching this video because it shows how up and coming VR experiences are not only similar to real world gaming experiences but as an artist this is an exciting field to be entering at this time.

VR Immersive Experience

 VR Immersive Experience

Team Three: Individual Contributions I

During this sprint I focused on gathering additional reference images for the bedside lamp and the folding luggage rack. I proxy modelled both assets and will continue to work on the low res and high res models this week. I also created a quick pillow proxy model to replace the cube pillow.

It was difficult to find the exact rack in the scene so I used different images found online. I was able to model the lamp with screenshots of the film prop and a diagram of lamp parts I found online:

The bedside lamp proved to be the most difficult of these three assets with each of the different components that assemble to get an accurate representation for the VR scene. The resulting work will be important to the narrative of the experience and one of the interactive elements for the player.

COMMON SEVENTH POST

 Common Seventh Post

Single low-poly grass blade manipulated and restructured.

4 x 4 groupings of non-overlap grass blades to create height variation for easy placement.

Several 4 x 4 grass blade patches create realistic grass variation.

Goal to create night ambient reflectivity off of individual blades.

 Final integration of game asset in Night Mountain Cottage render.

COMMON SIXTH POST

Common Sixth Post

Reference images for city ideas and three-perspective construction.

Cube proxy layout for three different cityscape perspectives.

Construction of glass windows and mass duplication with use of content browser.

Establishing camera angles for different visual perspectives.

Beginning to create dynamic lighting setup to highlight perspectives

Addition of ground texture for final render of one point perspective.

Full lighting setup for three point perspective.

Final render for two point perspective.