FMP Week 14 - One busy week

   As you can tell by the title its been a busy week. We've had industry people from Creative Assembly come in to give crit and feedback on our portfolio's and work in general. I've had some trouble with the engine file and I've down scaled my environment quite a bit.

   So lets start off at the beginning. The week started of as any other week has, texturing and applying the textures to the engine file, tweaking them along with sorting out light maps and unwraps etc. But shortly into the week I encountered a problem with the textures streaming contently. After a short while of a contently un-built level and a headache, Oh and the obvious google or two. I found out its to do with the memory "poolsize" that your GPU is allowing the engine to receive. By default its set at 1000, which is 1GB of GPU memory. You can find this out by typing in "Stat streaming" into your engine command prompt, it'll also tell you how much you're using, which should be under the 1000 allocated. Mine was but I was still having the problem, so by upping the poolsize to 2000 (2GB) the problem stopped. To increase the poolsize, you type in "r.streaming.poolsize" followed by a number, in my case 2000 was enough. Unfortunately this needs to be done every time you open the engine file, as it doesn't save your inputs.
 
After that issue was resolved I got back to the usual process of texturing, Working mainly on assets, rather than tillables.

Two air conditioning units.

Two different sized crates.

   Wednesday we had the pleasure of two ex DMU students come in from Creative assembly to critique our work and give us feedback on our FMP's. Ben Keeling (Environment artist) and Rich Carey (Character Artist) talked about their time and progress through the industry and gave some tips and info about what we should be doing, what to include in our portfolio's etc. Very informative stuff.
As Ben is the envuironment artist of the two he came over to give me some feedback on my environment. The main thing he talked about was the size of the scene. I've been told before about the size and thats been my biggest problem throughout the course, so to hear it again was no surprise. But he told me a few things I could to to reduce the size, what areas to discard etc. Along with that he mentioned there's currently a lot of white assets that need at least basic textures on ASAP.
   With regards to what I could scale down the environment and make it a bit more compact. Ben suggested to bring the market closer in towards the center, remove the stairs up to a dead end. Along with removing the starting area that leads behind the hotel and next to the wall, instead bringing it round the front. He also suggested to get rid of the small patio benched area in between the market and ship zones, because it doesn't add anything new and its just another area to populate. One final suggestion he mentioned was to move the ship closer to the chain link fence and vice versa.

Ben Keeling's layout suggestions.

Removed back way round hotel and added front route.

Smaller more compact route to door.

Ship and fence moved closer to each other.

Market moved in on itself.

Dead end was removed.

Picnic/Bench area has been cut off. 

Area around the ship has been moved in.

Area around the ship has been moved in.

   Overall I feel a lot better about the size and complexity of my environment now. It feels more real, and looking back at what it used to be has really put it into perspective on how large it was.

   Last of all this week I've been working on using bump offset in conjunction with height maps to give the illusion of added geometry within my textures. This may require some tweaking in my height maps as they didn't rise as much as I expected. This is something I plan to work further into.