Week 3/4/5 I Think

So I totally didn’t forget to write this post for Friday, but here it is. 

Over the past couple weeks I’ve had my head buried in  a lot of fun projects. Primarily, I’ve been putting the final touches on the polished version of BacteriAR. Which, I can happily say has been released onto the iOS App Store and Google play store. I put a lot of careful thought into the symbiotic colours through out the game. Using muted clean, clinical colours of the background and secondary environment props; also using bright, pop primary colours to highlight the primary gameplay elements. The choice to use vibrant colours wasn’t just a stylistic choice, but one to keep an appeal to younger children and entice them into continuing to play. 

Finally with BacteriAR as to develop a strong social media and marketing presence. By creating social media channels on the primary demographics most used platforms we can maximise our reach in terms of spreading awareness about the game. BacteriAR was a fun project to learn from and also ended up being a great research piece as it helped me understand the the process of identifying a target market and maximising the appeal to said market.

www.bacteriar.app/download

Next up I’ve been delving into learning about architectural CAD design for UE4. Exploring more into how unreal uses Datasmith to import loads of different formats and how they work with the engine and how I can utilise it to my advantage. Along with this I discovered Twinmotion with is essentially ‘UE4 for dummies’, a very simplistic version of the engine aimed to a market with a super simple learning curve and easy controls. Twinmotion is aimed at an industry planning and architecture demographic and allows for easy controls in terms of weather, lighting and time of day controls all with the adjustment of sliders. 

After running from Twinmotion back to my over complicated editor, I started to use some of this newly learnt understanding of datasmith and put it into practice. I started to take a look at some ways I can use datasmith to aid me in developing scenes and levels. After discovering a point cloud plugin for UE4 being able to import HUGE point cloud files, we’re talking like 4 even 5 GB’s Jim, it was still bloody hard to get them to work correctly in the engine. Apparently, I was doing it wrong (You’ve gotta convert the .pts file to a .txt and just delete the first line then it works 👍 ). However, the results were absolutely amazing. By amazing, I mean they were exactly as you’d expect... A visual point cloud in UE4.

After importing the point cloud I took it even further, I though ‘Well I might as well do something with this’. This is when I set a goal to myself to recreate this scene as if it was a living factory, taking into account practical uses for this where we can take 3D scans of factories and reconstruct them in engine and visualise them in VR. I tried to be clever about designing this scene, by looking at lots of visual reference for ‘Industrial Factories’ and taking those scenes and making them looked ‘Lived in’. For me, I like to create cinematic, moody and atmospheric experiences for users. However, Because this is intended to be used as a practical learning tool for professionals I kinda had to take some wise words James told me in second year ‘After I’ve finished going over the top and taking it to 11 just try and dial it back to about 8’. 

I tried to keep a lot of emphasis on the scene being real, so to achieve this I created very (if not too) dramatic lighting which creates a real sense of reality to the scene. Taking into account the natural randomisation of the storage racks and the minuscule offset of each barrel and crate which really does give an off-kilter sense of realism to the scene. One aspect I am proud of is that floor, I mean look at it, LOOK AT IT! It’s so subtle! It’s so clean yet so dirty! This along with the subtle hint of volumetric in the lights and scene really does bring it all together. I dunno thought it was hella cool and was really fun to make.

These are some simple ‘lighting only’ renders of the scene which really show the complexity and detail put in to the lighting itself.

Ok finally, some more completely irrelevant stuff now. This is some short snippets from the ‘super secret’ project me and Brandon are working on. I’ve been playing around with some mad visuals that make me feel warm and fuzzy/ cold and sad on the inside. 

***STROBE WARNING***