FMP Week 20 - The final Week of FMP and Uni.

   Well. Not only is it the last week of FMP, but its the last week of uni technically. After this we're on our own! Its been a very fast 3 years to say the least. Now its just degree show and graduation and then we're out into the world. But before all that, we still have this hectic week ahead.

   We were making some last minute changes and adding a few texture sheets. The idea was to have the project finished 2 weeks ago, but thanks to the suggestion of my mentor Dan, I gave myself a 2 week buffer at the end. And thank god I did. The texturing took a little longer than originally intended and we encountered a few other problems like decals, grass, crashes, loss of files etc.

   Jakes final versions of the characters were imported and placed after he tested them in a previous engine file a week or 2 ago. The animations ran smoothly aside from one mishap which was easily fixed. One character sits in the centre of the market, a nice start to your journey through the environment. The second is at the end of a dark tunnel on your way to the ship zone. I particularly like this one as you pass through the dark tunnel to only be illuminated by Jakes character at the end with his emissive backpack sign.

Jakes female character.

Jakes teenage merchant character.

Casto gave me some good crit today this week too. Dispite it being the end of the project. Either way it'll give me some things to do before degree show. He told me to include more grime on the walls, as more of a gradient from the floor. The plaster looks too much like primary colours, so maybe tweak those. The statue in the middle of the market could do with something more to make it stand out, more artistic vibrant graffiti etc. Which was my original plan, but I didnt want to rush the graffiti on it as its a centre peice to my level. So I opted for more of a subbtle graffiti and stickers. The final thing he suggested was a particular concrete tilable I have as one of the trim pieces on a building in the market. Not a big thing, but something to do before degree show.

   This week we wanted to get everything done by Monday to packages, and build lighting. But due to more tweaks we were pushed back to Wednesday. We had a test build on production lighting overnight. Which all was good and the engine was built again on Thursday and packaged that day too.

   Prior to this the changes I made included tweaking a few light maps and light map channels. Moving certain assets to avoid people getting out of the map. Adding collisions to the wire fence, which was previously removed to help mobility when testing, along with the wall collision. One mesh didn't have any smoothing groups on it because I hadn't reimported it in ages. Along with the finalised housekeeping of putting meshes in their desired folders and naming conventions etc. All was fixed!

   With working in a group its a lot harder to get everything planned down to a T. You're always going to encounter problems and when it comes to fixing things at the end it's very time consuming. If we all have a few tweaks, and everyone wants the engine file at once. It feels like ages before its your turn. But in the end we all got things done and handed in on time. We may not have everything we want in the final version and they'll always be tweaks to improve your work. But in the end you've just got to call it and move on. I feel I've learnt a great deal from this project. Both about working as a team and as an environment artist in general. So I consider this project to be a huge success from that alone. Now onto degree show!

FIN!