Week 4: Film Room Project Post Mortem

So after finishing the film room project last week I've had few days to let my brain calm down so I can actually begin to pick it apart.

The room we chose was an ambitious project for the time constrains we had to adhere to, which is not necessarily a bad thing, I just feel that as a whole we underestimated how long it would take to create the assets and room to a standard we were happy with.

Delicatessen Bathroom Scene Reference

We didn't do any concepting before modelling as a lot of the assets were common household items we could find reference for on the internet, however I feel it would have been good to do some concepting as it would have helped us achieve as more accurate feel to the room overall.

There was an issue with our planning as we had got confused with how long we had to do the project, meaning we had to adjust timeline which added pressure to complete it a week earlier.

Edited Time Plan

The modeling aspect I thought was a breeze until I had feed back from the group showing me where I could improve. In one case I had used unnecessary geometry and in another I could have used just a bit more to make a better overall model. I've learn a lot about the efficiency of modelling and where to implement strict use of a tri budget and where to add geometry where its really needed.

With texturing I learned that I need to keep my layers separate so that when it comes to adjudicating levels for the roughness/height maps it can be a breeze rather than a struggle. I also made a porcelain texture that didn't end up getting used as Josh's texture was better, this taught me to not be so precious about work that took time to make as sometimes it just isn't good enough and you have to try again.

Engine work was what we struggled with the most. I personally had a huge issue with my glass texture. In unreal you can't make a translucent alpha texture reflect any light, so I had a massive panic about how it stuck out like a sore thumb and how I felt like I had let the group down.

I then calmed myself and asked other groups how they had achieved a useable glass texture. I was directed to an online tutorial, this was perfect for clear glass, however I was trying to create a colored glass. I played around with a few options in unreal and was a bit closer but it was far too transparent so I edited the refraction options and it looked a bit better but it was far from what I wanted. There was simply not enough time left to fix what I wanted.

I really feel that we underestimated how long you needed to edit stuff in engine, and how its not just an add on at the end kind of thing. When sorting out the lighting, I was given my albedo textures back and told to fix them as the color correction for the green overlay had edited the appearance of half the objects so they didn't look right in the scene.

Final Scene

Our final scene was not 100% perfect but I think we did really well, we worked really well as a team which greatly benefited our productivity and efficiency in what we were producing. If we could do this project again, I would definitely plan more time for engine work and integrate it along my timeline of tasks rather than smack it on at the end.