Evaluation / Reflection
Landscape Terrain
Efficiency / Optimisation
Ultimately I am quite happy with my landscape, initially I had set the scale too large and tuned it down, but in hindsight I could have approached this with a 2048 landscape especially considering I essentially cut the exterior quads off of my 4096 and then reduced the size by 35% on both the X and Y axis.
Aesthetic / Look & Feel
I kept my landscape smooth, refined and in line with the area surrounding the intended real world area/example I had initially decided on. I did pull one small section up because the reality is every landscape, town and city are all built on earth that isn’t always as smooth as one might think outside of the roads and buildings.
This took some time, and ultimately I felt like I spent too long checking other methods and techniques given my own personal time constraints regardless of ones for the units.
Future Development
Regarding future development in regards to terrain I honestly probably wouldn’t expand much on this because I’ve already considerably tweaked and refined the visible areas. What I will do is remove excess geometry out of visible range once absolutely certain these areas won’t be accessible or part of the player experience.
Procedural Foliage
Efficiency / Optimisation
The settings I’ve used on my distance and filler landscape foliage are very basic and low quality because essentially they just need to fill distance gaps and add that element of depth and believe there is something outside the current player bounds. Initially I was sceptical this would translate well due to having performance issues with earlier foliage used around my park but this has worked wonders, especially with an added culling volume and general LOD’s set on my chosen foliage.
Aesthetic / Look & Feel
These generally look fine, not many areas needing covering really, half of my landscape areas that are visible to the player from the town are rocky meaning grass wouldn’t be growing there for the most part.
Future Development
For now my foliage is taken from the UE Kite Demo and optimised a little for my purpose but for future use I’d make much more simplistic planes of grass composed of several polygons and create clusters of these. This would without doubt add to the performance of my level.
Ongoing Texturing Process
Note: Whilst summarising these below I have gone into great depth on my posts here and here and have been critical of my work passively whilst going through the general process.
Efficiency / Optimisation
After a year of working towards a future in this industry I have applied all my best techniques in both the modelling; ensuring the topology is as close to flawless as possible (from a quad perspective primarily) without any erronoues or non-manifold geometry, that the UV’s and the maps are considered in advance and so on. All of my houses within my scene (of which there are numerous) share 1 single 4096 map for example which will add to overall loading and system performance.
Aesthetic / Look & Feel
I spent considerable time on my warehouse and housing mod packs whilst doing the same on each individual asset textured date. Hopefully this is reflected for the end user.
Future Development
Whilst working towards an end goal project for unit 3 I have a vast amount of assets that need texturing and in some cases re-modelling, tweaking or just fine tuning UV’s so in that case there will be future development from an aesthetic perspective until the end of my HND.
Wayne Marsden - Unit 70 