FMP Week 19 - The ends drawing closer and we're running out of time!

   Only 1 weeks left now. The second too last week has passed, and we were meant to be finished by now. But as for most things, not everything goes the way you want. But that's ok, because we have 2 weeks of buffering to help with that!

   Well anyway, this week consisted of more texturing, as always. More decals, grass, even more texturing, optimization and I've also encountered a few problems. I'm not going to talk about the texturing I've done this week, because whoever's actually reading my blog will surely be fed up of hearing about how I've been doing it for the past few weeks. So lets skim over that shall we? Good!

   The problem I had last week where the grass wasn't causing shadows is still an issue. I had this problem before during the style matrix project, and after searching through the settings I found the hidden "cast shadows" tick box. BUT! this was already ticked in this project, and after a bit of research and help from Craig. I found that UE4.8 has no fix. they introduced the fix in 4.9. Which is what I used for the style matrix. The only reason we didn't use 4.9 for FMP was because it has a habit of glitching and freezing the lighting build. The only solution for which, is to rebuild the whole scene. Out of the question for something this big. 4.10 wasn't finished at the start of the project, so that wasn't an option either. We thought it'd be best to keep too a finished engine version with no harsh bugs. This has only gave us problems in terms of grass, decals, and other settings that aren't added to this version. But those problems have just given us a reason to search for alternatives, which can only improve our knowledge of the engine and workflow.

Over the previous weekend I made some paper decals to layout on the floor, litter papers etc. Originally I made two versions, but it was apparent they where a fairly square texture. So I made a third more spread out and sparce decal to add tot he mix. These together are enough to give a good amount of variation in my opinion. I feel I could add more in the future, possibly for degree show. But These are great for now. They really add that extra level of variation to the floor after the macro variation from last week.

Paper floor decals with 2 versions.

Paper floor decals with 3 versions.

   During this project I upgraded my substance painter to version 2. I knew I might have some issues, but I figured I could always go back if something goes wrong. It turns out when you open the version of your file in substance painter 2, you can't reopen it in a previous version. So I'm stuck working in 2. This has been fine apart from one error that happens occasionally with certain files. In the top right hand corner of my diffuse map. And only my diffuse map. I get a dark square overlaying my texture. This only occurs on a few of my texture sheets. I don't know anyway to remove it, aside form exporting again and again and hoping for the best. I tried exporting as TGA'S (Packaged and unpackaged) JPEG'S, PNG's etc. but nothing worked! I also put a comment on the forums about it. I'm still awaiting a response.

Top right dark patch error.

   The way I got round a few of them was to export the texture sheet with only half of it loaded in. As I assumed it was because of what was on the texture sheet. Maybe it was too complex for painter to handle. Exporting parts at a time worked for one of the sheets but I couldn't do it for another as all the layers were used on each bit of the sheet.

   I also ended up removing all the padding from my maps in order to save on memory. It turns out this gives you really bad seems along the actual seems of your assets. So I re-exported all of them again, back to the original version with padding.

   Anya gave a nice presentation about the process she went through when creating her dioramas for FMP. She talked about the sketches, what you might be more inclined to include, what not to include, levels of a diorama and she also touched on colour theory too. Really interesting stuff, and I'll definitely be taking her points into account if I end up making a diorama in the future.