Ivy and Banners

After adding some dynamic effects to my scene, I felt the courtyard was looking empty so I began to think of more of a back story to the area to help me with ideas for what props to add. I came up with the idea that the palace was being prepared for the royal return. The family has been away, perhaps on holiday or to visit family and is now returning. They would obviously expect the palace to be in top condition and clean. This explains the trimmed bushes and tidy bedroom. The outer courtyard stone will be worn down as it is not a newly erected palace however it will not be so old that the pillars are falling apart or cracks everywhere. With this story in mind I began to think of what would be arranged for the family's arrival and thought about having banners with the family crest on. I went and did some research to find out the name of the family who used to live at the Alhambra and discovered the name "Mohammed I ibn Nasr". This was a prominent family in the Masrid dynasty and the coat of arms for this was as follows:

Heralder. (2013). Coat of Arms of the Emirate of Granada (1013-1492). Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasrid_dynasty#mediaviewer/File:Coat_of_Arms_of_the_Emirate_of_Granada_(1013-1492).svg. Last accessed 28/11/2014.

The next task was to add this symbol to some banners and dress the courtyard area.

I chose the colours for the banners based on the family's colours and the bedroom colours I had chosen earlier in the project. I wanted to tie in the two rooms so they felt like part of the same building even though one was exterior and one was interior. It was a nice coincidence that the red colour of the family crest was near the same colour of the furniture I had used inside so it did not require much tweaking.

For extra detail I added some ivy running down off some of the roof section. I used an ivy generator to get a basic ivy mesh. 

I found this was very useful as it helped vastly with the time element. If I had created my own ivy leaf (sculpted in ZBrush, baked and then placed hundreds over some branches) it would have taken twice as long if not longer. It took a bit of time to understand the ivy generator and to get some pieces that I was happy with me but it was still quicker than any other attempts I had made. I added my own textures and materials to the leaves and branches then placed a number of clumps around the scene to add more colour variation to the scene.

Thomas Luft. (2008). An Ivy Generator. Available: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. Last accessed 30/11/2014.

Water Shader

To add some dynamic elements to my scene I worked on creating a simple water shader for the fountain. I used the following tutorial for the base shader then tweaked values and settings to my won design.

Pub Games. (2014). UE4 - Interior Water #1. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPmRV1Z9ikY. Last accessed 27/11/2014.

One of the first issues I faced was making sure that the water was moving in the right direction. Using the values from the tutorial made my water move incorrectly and stretched it. To counteract this I simply has to change the RGB values on the panner to correspond to the correct axis.

Incorrect panning

The next issue was making the water the colour I wanted it to be. The tutorial gives a completely see through, almost black water colour and I wanted a much nicer clear blue colour. To change this I added an albedo map in the base colour section instead of using an RGB value. By doing this I got a more natural colour but I also had to make sure that the texture map was using a panner as well so it blended into the motion of the water.

When playing around with the panners I realised that the water was moving too fast for the wind speed in the environment so I lowered the panner constant values to decrease this. I also noticed that the water was too transparent so I played with the depth fade value so that the water was not disappearing too soon for the player to even see it.

Final Shader:

UPDATE: I used rotators instead of panners for the final water shader as it gave a more realistic feel to the water movement.

Courtyard colour scheme

After spending some more time on my courtyard area I began to realise it was all very similar colours and I wanted to introduce some colour. I had recently played a section of Dragon Age Inquisition that was in a slightly Moorish style.

Ian Miles Cheong. (2014). Dragon Age 3: Inquisition Screenshots Surface With New Details. Available: http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/23326/article/dragon-age-3-inquisition-screenshots-surface-with-new-details/. Last accessed 30/11/2014.

Looking at this area I drew inspiration to add some blues to the area so I began to experiment with different combinations.

Original

Added in blue

With blue and gold

I wanted to make the courtyard feel more like a royal palace so with inspiration from the Dragon Age scene added in some gold elements. I feel this works well at framing the edges and makes the scene a lot more visually interesting. I may tone the gold down so its not quite so shiny and to make it look weathered but I am happy with the colour scheme thus far.

UPDATE: 02/12/2014: I have added a roughnesss element to the gold so it still looks like metal but is not so blinding when the sunlight reflects off it. It still shines when the camera/player runs alongside it but it blends in nicer now and does not distract the eye from the rest of the scene.

Courtyard Work

The main area I wanted to focus on now was the courtyard as I had spent most time working on the interior bedroom area. I began by changing the flooring to a tiled surface instead of the gravel texture that was previously applied.

Before

After

This makes the area feel more like a patio and gives the floor more definition and interest. After the floor I then added a lip to the archways so the pattern did not stop so abruptly, added a walkway around the patio area under the archways to break up the are some more.

Lip and walkway (base textures)

The next steps after alpha

After alpha feedback there was a lot of things to work on so I created a list do I could then replan my time.

1) Cut off living room area - this will allow me more time to polish the bedroom and courtyard areas rather than spreading myself thin and making each area average.
2) Set the scene - create variation, add small assets to tell a story, make the scene look lived in
3) Work on the fountain - really push this as my beauty piece, resculpt the lions, add another tier maybe and texture well.
4) Work on the courtyard - create a tiled floor, make the plant pots look like they are part of the floor, add a lip to the archways so that the texture does not end abruptly
5) Create some trim texture to add variation and make the rooms look more interesting

Things to look into:
- Vertex animation on curtains
- Water shader
- God ray creation

Alpha Stage cinematic

This is a video of my cinematic in its current state. For alpha I made sure all content and models were imported and all models had at least base textures on.

The next stage:
After alpha these are the things I need to work on for the final result

1) Resculpt lions and rebake higher resolution normal and AO maps
2) Add more variation to plant life
3) Finalize all textures
4) Improve lighting - try and get light shafts through the windows and maybe some dust motes
5) Make own water shader to add to the water channels and water pool.

Lighting Problems

I now have all models in Unreal 4 and all with at least a base colour applied. This means the scene is starting to represent how it will look in the final result. The next stage is to add some lighting.

At this stage I started encountering errors. There are large seams down each modular piece of the walls and light seems to be coming through as if the models are not there at all. This was the first major area to fix. I started by changing settings in the indirect lighting, sky light and light mass settings. All of these reduced the seam but did not get rid of it. I looked to see if there was a lightmap issue that was causing the error. I made sure each UV was snapped to a pixel and that there was enough padding around the edge. This did not fix the issue either. In the end it was decided to combine all my modular pieces together into one wall for each room. This fixed the seams.

(left: uncombined walls, seam, right: combined walls, no seam)

Another issue I had was the directional light bleeding through the corners, top and bottom of my walls. I needed to keep this light in to simulate the sunlight outside. I tried searching for a solution online and may people had experienced this problem with no real answer or solution. In order to combat this I added a small BSP volume behind each wall, this stopped the light bleeding through fixed the issue for now. For final presentation I will try and find a more feasible solution but as the camera for the flythrough will not go near any windows so will not show this BSP it seems suitable for now. In future I will add thickness to the walls in Maya and simply not UV map or texture the back faces.

Materials

On the run up to alpha I started to look at making materials look more lifelike using normals, roughness and metallic maps. I mainly focused on the large assets to begin with such as the walls and floors.

The above image is showing the difference between the original bedroom floor (left) and when I created a normal map and tweaked the roughness value (right). You can see the normal map adds in all the little ridges in the tiles and makes them feel more worn and less polished.

This image shows the same effect on the wall tiles. Before (left) they did not have a roughness map or any normals. I created roughness map with a small wave texture on the tiled area. This added the reflective effect to the tiles and the wave stopped them from looking too smooth.