year two, first week roundup

After a long summer spent drawing and painting I've now begun year two on game art design here at uni.  Last year I basically neglected this blog. But this time around its got to be a weekly thing.

Our first project of the year was only a week long and doubled up not only as an introduction to working with PBR (physically based rendering) in the new unreal engine 4, but also as an introduction to working as a team to create assets before exporting them into a scene.

The project was called 'asset swap' and involved creating assets such as a trestle table, bench and a shield for a small viking banquet. It began by assigning one different asset to each person in the group, once that person had developed concepts for the asset, the concept was then given to the next person to begin modelling, and the model passed on again for texturing and so forth. This process of basically meant that everyone in the group worked on every asset at some stage.

Personally I thought this process came with some drawbacks, for instance, when it came to texturing you had to hope that the person before you had made a good job of unwrapping the model efficiently, otherwise you were going to have a harder time texturing. For the most part though, I thought this process helped to achieve a consistent style throughout each asset, as opposed to if people had worked on assets individually.

The hardest part of this project for me was getting my head around the new physically based rendering in UE4. This is a new way of texturing that does away with specular and diffuse maps, replacing them with albedo, metalness and roughness maps.With the old way the amount of reflectivity and shine of a material was defined by the levels of specularity in the specular map, whether this was metal, plastic or skin. Now you can define whether or not a material is a metal, and then you can define the roughness/smoothness of a material, which will dictate how much light information is picked up by that surface. Traditionally you might also paint 'fake' light information such as ambient occlusion on the diffuse texture, with an albedo map however you use purely flat colour information as all the light is defined by other maps and scene lighting. Its an easy concept to understand and actually quite simple in practice, but still something I have yet to grasp properly.