07/03/2016 - Update

Week 09

Fire Follower

Today I have the Unreal fire following my camera movements in engine, this is a partial success. This is because the fire follows, but, it doesn't seem to move up and down with the camera, just side to side, like its on a circle around the player. For the player to fully see the cave paintings I will need the fire to be movable on the y-axis to see the ceiling. I also need to model a torch stick for the fire to go on, which will only create new problems of placing the stick in a way where it looks like the fire is coming from it. My first thought about originally getting the fire to move with the camera was using Blueprint, this did not go well at all. I didn't understand what I was doing even after watching several tutorials explaining Blueprint, I do somewhat understand the principle but as for the execution....I have struggled severely. Only after talking to the lecturer did I get the feedback of perhaps just grouping the fire to the camera, this is what worked for me and is where I am of writing this post.

Modelling

Dagger

This is my dagger prop for inside my cave. I have made it in two pieces, blade and handle. The blade will be made from stone and the handle wood.

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I just used soft select to get a more natural edge to the blade.

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Rope Attachment

as you can see here, the red part is an extruded loop of face and is where I am planning on painting some sort of binding rope in the normals

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 Horn

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This was relatively simple to model, I just created this from a cylinder and added the necessary edge loops for the geometry.

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I will need to slightly edit this asset before smoothing because there is some clipping at the opening...actually, I will just need to add some edge loops around the opening so it does not clip into itself.

 Spear

This spear started its virtual life as a long cylinder, I then added some edge loops then selected these edge loops individually and rotated them a bit and moved them, this gave me the results below.

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 Torch

This is the stick for my torch, I intend on adding some rags at the top to indicate where the fire is coming from. This was modeled in the same fashion as the spear.

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Pot

This is a paint pot that the protagonist has used to hold his paint while he did the cave paintings. I want to go back and edit this using soft selection to get a more rock like feel, since this pot has been carved from a rock. History has revealed that they used seashells primarily as paint pots but I find it more visual cohesive to have the paint pot carved from a stone.

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Cave Paintings

Today I have drawn up some quick concepts for what I imagine the characters to look like, the rest of the look of the cave paintings will be based off the final design I pick.

Below I have circled the favourable designs in green and the unfavourable ones in black. I will discuss them below the image.

The majority of the black circled ones are circled because I find them too cute/cartoony and they would not suit the tone of the narrative, they are too stylistic which moves them away from a more traditional cave paintings style. I like the top left green circled design because of the basic geometry utilized. I could also imagine me designing the animals with very round geometry to clash with the harsh geometry of the humans (some might read a certain meaning out of that (humans are bad)). 

I like the bottom left green circled design because that depiction of a human is quite different but not in a cute way. It could symbolize that perhaps this particular tribe have bent necks in a way different from ours. It begs the question of what made the painter depict himself/other humans in that way.

The middle green circled one on the right, I like the way it has been loosely coloured in to imply a general fill colour. I also like the design element of the legs being a continuation of the lines making up the torso (as evident through many of my designs here).

The top right circled one is the mandatory stick man, most of all the humans in cave paintings in my research have been a stick man in one way or another. I don't think I would really go with this though, It just doesn't really hit a creative artery with me.

and the last greeb circled design, It's much like the top left but made more simply. I think it would be difficult to convey the extreme emotions without a face...or even a head.

 Here I have tested out my method of making the paintings looked chipped and old, I have just used a textured eraser to break up the lines from the image above to make the image below. I think it has been successful and this is probably going to be something I do to my cave paintings.

Just to reiterate, I plan on painting all my narrative elements in Photoshop then placing them over the Uvs and saving out a load of different textures of the same modular cave piece, this way I can perhaps easily construct my level with the cave paintings included, This is just one idea (my only idea)...I will talk with one of the lecturers to hel me out with this problem I may have and to see if my solution firstly is viable.