Temple

this was one of the four 3D scenes I made for my dissertation project. These four scenes are meant to show narrative through game environment.

Bifrost Terrain Generation:

The decision to utilize Bifrost was mainly intended for practice and to help familiarize myself with the tool. However, opting for traditional sculpting would have been a lot more efficient. In terrain generation, Bifrost is mainly efficient to use in situations that would require generating procedural elements based on the terrains characteristics or other more complex behaviours, which the scene in question is not planned to utilize.

Explaining the logic:

The bifrost graph takes the vertex points of an object from the scene when the object is dragged into the graph using a middle click. These points are then moved along the object’s surface using a noise function. Afterwards, the moved points are used to alter the shape of the mesh based on their position dictated by the noise.

Figure 4 was the maya graph to generate a proper mesh from the Bifrost graph’s result. It can be noted by the green in the first picture that the material might be lost after generating topology from a bifrost graph/ the second picture is the converted bifrost mesh smoothed out with a new material applied.

my first attempt at creating a waterfall through maya’s default water simulation method:

The main issues I encountered while simulating the waterfall were:

Interacting with the cave’s mesh due to it being enclosed rather than a traditional landscape mesh although this was easily fixed by switching the way it handles model interaction
Performance issues due to unoptimized simulation methodThese issues led me to remove the water fall from maya as to replace it with one in unreal engine due to the water simulation in unreal engine being a lot more efficient and performance friendly as opposed to the one in maya given that unreal engine is optimized for real time renders.

General Environment:

When I made the first version of the rocks, I used sculpting instead of randomized noise, which would have been the easier method, this is because I wanted to have more control over these rocks. Due to performance issues, I decided to reduce the topology of the object. Another issue I was facing was the mesh glitching out and becoming very sharp and uneven when transferring computers what would be fixed through reapplying the smoothing sculpt brush. Given similar errors, the most likely reason is an issue with temporary files while transferring my external hard drive from one computer to another. This led me to start backing up everything on OneDrive before switching computers. The rocks on the side were removed to replace them with a more visually appealing background item that would give more relevance to the story.

Modelling Temple:

After the old temple was switched with the new one, I changed the rock scattering to fit the new shape better. Originally the temple was modelled in a very unoptimized way, creating an incredibly high poly count and a lot of non-manifold geometry and Ngons. For the new temple in Figure 10, I decided to keep it with a relatively low poly count and keep it as optimized as possible, this means that the detail will be added later with things like height maps or parallax maps.

Due to wanting to keep things organized, I created a script to batch rename objects, namely the temple’s pillars and repeated decoration pieces. This script works by storing the selected objects in an array and replacing their name with a name indexed through a for loop that considers the hierarchy of the selection.

preparing to switch old temple model with new oe - Copy.png

Preparing For Texturing:

I re created the mesh in order to make UV mapping easier through better edge flow. This is because the old version was one with the re topologize tool which didn’t have the edge flow equal, rather it focused topology in strategic areas to reduce polycount, which ultimately made things annoying to work with. I UV mapped the terrain through a half based approach since it would help minimize seams while preserving the integrity of the UV map. I went through all the pieces of the temple to re check that there was nothing wrong with the models that I either didn’t realize or happened later on by accident. During this(Figure 20), I had to completely re model the stairs due to unintentional non manifold geometry from an unrealized extrude. As per Figure 21, I also started changing the positioning of the rocks so that they make more sense in relation to the building and the environment. The rocks were UV mapped using a normal based UV cut in half approach, as I did with the main cave.

Initial Texturing:

For my first attempt at texturing the temple scene, I decided to use slate for most of terrain elements. The texture I used for the platforms and pillars of the temple was a modified paper texture. The modified paper texture was the result of an accident while texturing a different model, which subsequently prompted me to experiment more with the substance painter texture settings. For the decoration faucets, I used a metallic texture for the frame and a quilted purple texture for the faucets themselves. Finally, for the building’s wall I used a stylized rock texture layered over a slate texture to have a different texture while also keeping it consistent.

Retexturing (Temple):

The first thing done in the retexturing was making the textures darker, this was because of not knowing the origin of the colour space issue at the time. When it comes to the waterfall, the initial idea was to only use the unreal engine Niagara system, however, after experimenting a more efficient method was ideated. The idea was to sculpt the waterfall with the addition of a water shader while only using the particle system for supporting effects. This resulted in a more realistic waterfall while making it less taxing on the machine. The logic of the water shader is that it uses the unreal engine default water texture while panning a normal map along the UV coordinates of the mesh, effectively animating the texture of the model to simulate the appearance of the waterfall. At first this was done with the same speed on a mesh sculpted as the same object, however it was later changed to be the sculpted mesh for th3e waterfall area and a plane for the river area to be able to have a faster water speed for the waterfall and a slower water speed for the river itself. Additionally, the use of lighting was implemented to help add more depth to the scene while also hiding the seams through a very bright light between the sculpted waterfall and the river part of the waterfall. Another aspect of lighting that was added is subtle lighting inside the building, emission lighting from the decorative items and an irregular orb with the same material as the ones in the volcano to tie things together.