18/02/2016 - Previs

Week 06

Pre-Viz

In the past week I have been prevising my cave with the layout that I set out in Photoshop. This has been largely successful.

This first image is showing that I have managed to import modular pieces of a previs cave into Unreal successfully, The only problem I had was the scale, even though I changed the settings in Maya to metres, the models were still extremely small when imported into Unreal. I have managed to solve this problem though, I had been under the impression (from Professional Projects) that we had to model in metres because that is the unit of measurements that Unreal uses...this is wrong. I need to model in metres in Maya, export with the scale set to centimetres and it should all import into Unreal just fine, where as before Unreal registered ever metre from Maya as one centimetre. 

I have made a bit of a mistake though, Even though I exported my mesh as a centimetres it turns out that I hadn't been working in metres in Maya, I had been building everything according to centimetres so it obviously came into Unreal small anyway...but not nearly as small as it did for my Assets for Professional projects. So this means that next time I model assets (in metres) I will be able to import them into Unreal with the scale intended. 

Here is my model that I managed to import from Maya. The geometry is awful but for the purpose of laying out my cave plan in 3D, it has proven extremely useful. I can now walk through my previs cave and examine the height and width and plan out my cave paintings more accurately. I believe that I should now re-do this previs cave as I believe that I will be able to get batter results with less stress.

Collisions

These images are showing my collision learning. The pic above is where I just clicked on auto-collision and kept the settings, I found that this made my computer run extremely slow by the time I got to the 5th or 6th piece of cave. It seemed as if the 5th piece was going to take a few hours to complete where as the first ones only took a few minutes. obviously this was a problem. The settings for the auto-collision can be seen on the bottom right of the image below. I did some digging around and based on a couple of forums, I changed the, "Collision Complexity" to, "Use Complex Collisions As Simple". I presume that this setting makes the complicated collision box above into a simple one, this greatly improved the speed of adding collisions and I was able to manage this no problem.

 This image below is my new collision detection, for some reason the actual box that represents the collision isn't here and this is the same for all my assets. It doesn't seem to be a problem though...but only time will tell.