Best Of

The past week has been pretty slow, mostly watching tutorials and planning / discussing ideas. I was really inspired by this concept by Chris Doretz of what looks like a plastic quarantine tunnel running through a damaged hospital area. It looked like it would introduce some really cool opportunities for lighting and also breaking up the harsh brutalist shapes that our lab environment seems to be going down. The idea at the moment is that the tube can run through a biohazardous room where a cloning accident has taken place, so client demand is so high that they can't deal with the fallout at the moment so the area gets vacuum-sealed and production continues like normal. This will give the player the opportunity to walk through and be able to see (maybe partially see because of semi-transparency? will help decrease my workload) and get some environmental storytelling.


https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dyoELK

So I started researching examples of this kind of quarantine tunnel. I couldn't find many real world examples but i did find a couple in films like ET (1982) and 12 Monkeys (1995). There were a couple references of air purifying tubes and machines connected to the tunnels which would be cool to make too afterwards. All of the film screenshots I got from the website shotdeck.com, it's one of my favourites other than pinterest for collecting references!





So I started by blocking out a segment in UE and importing it into Maya. Then I used a lattice on a cylinder and torus to deform it into this shape. Originally the "plastic" wasn't a plane and had some thickness, but this caused me problems down the line when doing the transparent material. The polycount is quite high because i knew that i wanted to turn this into a spline tool and didn't want any visible polygons.




The metal material was nothing special, but for the clear plastic, I followed a transparent glass material on yt. For some reason in the tutorial, his material seems to cast its own shadow while mine doesn't, so that's on my list of things to investigate. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/PkLR8OqPzCA




I wanted to experiment with displacement but for now using normal maps was easier. The segments aren't UVed so i wanted to try using tri-planar projection for the first time. I took the normal and roughness map from a tarp fabric material from Quixel Megascans (https://www.fab.com/listings/ca2bcb13-13c3-4fcc-8bfc-4ba863fd2de6) projected those onto the plastic material following this tutorial. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/r5CxcpxGe-Y

I was really happy with the results! I think I might try to do a lot more triplanar projections in our game environments especially for the spacious and clean client areas. This is what the tube segments looked like now, pus the material setup.





So next job was to make it into a spline tool which wasn't as easy as i thought it would be. I went through 3 tutorials before i found one which worked for me, but it still isn't perfect. Sometimes some weird artifacts or collapsing in on itself happens if the spline is an odd length. The tutorial that worked for me was this one. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/l5W8KdQYI7k




and the final result was pretty good! i still have some issues i need to iron out like why the plastic doesnt cast a shadow and how come when playing as a third-person character the camera has no collision with the tube when the character walking through does. There's also other things like how to put an end piece at the back of the spline regardless of its length, and also I was advised by my lecturer that it should have some kind of connecting mechanism at both or one end where in the real world it would connect to a doorway or wall so it could create an airtight vacuum-seal. For now, here are some more screenshots and lighting experiments.

Update on the game mechanic tests

https://youtu.be/EGnBv3jJlbI?si=MszNz1i2Y7ECUSfZ

Updates =

- Changed it so that the player can only play from the other robot's perspective, so there is only one button for switching the robots which feels more intuitive
- Added a look at robot function to help players orientate themselves after switching to another robot
- Added a function that checks if both robots are in line of sight with each other
- Added drone interaction with environment technology
- Added wheeler interaction with environment physics objects
- Basic flashlight toggle

Possible improvements next =

- Add function to disconnect robots if line of sight with each other is lost for too long
- Add function to disconnect robots if they are too far from each other
- improve / change wheeler physics interaction to be more intuitive 

Feedback needed =

- Ideas for interesting level design / puzzles to utilize the mechanics?
- Other mechanics that fits even better for the two robots?

Slowly picking away at my jedi character. Got a TON of polish to do now that everything's in engine 

https://polycount.com/discussion/233402/wip-jedi-realtime-character-metahumans-in-ue-5-6#latest

Dropping a new Artstation post. Had some time to work on some modeling, texturing, and rendering practice for this laser sight 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YGW3ZX