Final Post

Hand In Post

In this post I will describe the contributions I made to the level and I will discuss the project's course/path and how I feel the project went.

During the first week of the project we discussed roles and it was settled that I would be an art director and manage the mood, colour scheme and general look of the level. We discussed ideas went away for the first week to research so we could present our ideas and settle on an idea the next week.
This is the work I did this week:

• Gathered ref on pinterest: https://uk.pinterest.com/matthewscott507/victorian/

• Set up google drive file sharing and folder structure for the team

• Set up and organised structure for sharing ref with the team. Decided the file formats, scale and decided where the different types of reference should be submitted for ease of sharing between group members.

• Uploaded primary research from The Abbey Pumping Station and the Grand central Railway Station in lough borough as I was the on to gather reference from both trips :
• Pumping Station: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5lh6cLldyuySW1OYXl0dE9XQTg
• Train Station: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4jHXZ62AyAmbFR3SlFtT2FqV1U

From very early on I found myself doing a lot of the work for the whole group that should have been contributed to by everyone and should have been done by other people in respect to the roles they chose.

I set up the file sharing system, I learned and set up Perforce initially for the entire group and continued to do so a lot of times throughout the first few weeks. (excluding Holly who was unfortunately in hospital at the time and set perforce up on her own.) 

Throughout the first two weeks during the conception phase and white boxing stage I was also the only person to use unreal and to get any of the white boxing into the level.

I gave a lecture to the group about what modularity is and how it's used in a level as my group didn't understand how it works to well. This misunderstanding caused some snags in the production pipeline of the level but proposed challenges to overcome that served to change the way we looked at our level as starting fresh is sometimes the best way to reinvent something that isn't working.

I felt like a very large amount of my time was taken up by doing the unreal, perforce, white box and dimension/scale maths  have been learning themselves/contributing to. This left me having a lot of time taken away from the visual studies side of the project.

We met up at the start of the second week to discuss the ideas we had reviewed:

• Created mood boards for level

The original white box corrupted in labs:

Here is the original white box used to plan out and pitch the level layout:

During the meeting the member of the team who should have been taking minutes forgot their pen/notebook so I took notes/drew diagrams and organised the initial 2-3 big brainstorming sessions. I also had to retype and restructure the notes for group use on Google Drive as the notes that where typed up by the other group member didn't make any sense.

Here are the notes/workings out and diagrams I made during this project:

• Google Drive minutes:

• Notes from sketchbook

During this time, because we had an up and coming presentation of the level and I was the only person to have used unreal yet, I decided to make the second white box, using the proper proportions for the modular pieces. Only in order to block out the size of the rooms. I chose the size of the blocks and the size of a standard room in order to create the scale/space for the level. Before building anything, I created a test level and made several different height rooms using different sized pieces and my team chose the best size collectively.

This version of the white box also corrupted (I don't have a screen capture of this crash, however it happened in Labs, on the same floor as the last crash). I do however, have an export of the geometry from unreal. Meaning, that I can't edit it if i needed to. 

At this time, the team found out that we hadn't seen Ana, the other member of our team for weeks, because she had dropped out which put a lot of stress on the team and picked up the workload.

Me and Holly collaborated on the Style Guide for the level. I helped out by quoting a lot of the information word for word on what to put into the style guide and instructed on how to format and phrase certain things. Some of the images I had put together where used from my own personal style guide that I had made for the level as well.

• my personal style guide can be seen here (or above under my concept art):

                      (Part of Holly's Style Guide)                                (Part of my style Guide)

Holly's style guide link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17g3M4NW1qMCOlvgOX_oA_CSsBIp05iAWqKo2NMcY8DM/edit?usp=sharing

During the time that one of our team members was in labs the level save on perforce broke. I wasn't present at the time, however, as soon as it happened I rushed into labs to try to fix it. However, the level had been fixed by the tutors at Holly's request which was good news. The incident has been put down to the way perforce was set up. Which I seem to be taking responsibility for as I set perforce up. However, I didn't set the level up/edit any of perforce preferences. The issue was caused by bad handling and practice whilst using perforce's check in/check out system during the early use of perforce by everyone in the group. All I did was teach people how to connect and set up their work space.

During mid week 3 (Wednesday), I arrived in labs to find out that two of the members of the team think that the scale for the modular kit I had created for the level was wrong due to the scale of their assets when imported. However, I didn't understand why they believed so. After a conversation to find out why they thought this, I still didn't understand why and neither did some of the other students who tried to understand the problem. After my opinion was overruled, without my agreement and without notifying the rest of the team, the decision was made to remove all of the work from the level and to restart using the new correct sized assets for the job. During the same issue, I was told that I needed to change the scale of all of my assets to fit the scale of the new level. I didn't understand why because it didn't make sense to do so. After scaling down all of my assets which took a long time, I imported them into unreal to find that I was correct in thinking they where the correct scale and was told to rescale them back up again. Finally, level was left to be rebuilt, the task left to me, as the member that had deleted my work from the level left for EGX in london on the same day. The issue was caused by a misunderstanding of how modularity works between the two members of the group. The issue that they thought was a problem was explained after the work had been deleted by me and other students in the class at the time and an apology was given to me for the misunderstanding, however the issue was unrecoverable so we had to move on. I feel like this impacted my work tremendously not only through the time that I could have spent working on producing models at the time but also the stress that the situation put me and the rest of the group in. I didn't replace the assets that where deleted as I spent too much time re-scaling the assets I had to edit back to their original size. So when the group got back together, the assets where replaced by the person that removed them.

These are the assets I made for the level:

• Asset zoo:

• Assets up close that I have created:

• Asset Placement:

These are examples of me using other people's assets to improve the level and save time on asset reproduction. The right is before the changes and the left is after the changes.

• Light map density:

I changed and edited all of my own light map densities in unreal to make them consistent with everything else in the level before everyone changed their own.

• Final Renders:

   (chandelier removed)

    (stage removed)


This project though me a lot about how to deal with stress and how to work around problems in a tricky situation. I feel as though a lot of problems arose in this project through the stress of every member of the team. I am, however, very happy with the final result of the level.