week11: updates

Some updates I felt could all go in a blog post together.

I wanted to work on the trousers and change the UV layout so the stripes would go down the leg instead of warping around. I achieved this by changing how the UVs were positioned, I was able to straighten them up into rows and this worked quite well. On the picture below you can see the difference between the two legs, The leg on the left shows the uvs normal but the stripes curving around. And then with the leg on the right you see the strips going down, this is because I changed the UV layout. I feel this works much better and looks more natural and realistic. 

Here is what the UV layout now looks like.

Update since then: I have realised that by changing the layout I have messed up the high to low poly bake, as the normal and occlusion map are following the old UV layout. And of course now I can not re bake them out as the position is different. As of yet I have not been able to think of a solution, so I suppose we shall have to look forward to the future and see how I work around this.

I wanted to fill up the scene a bit more to give it more of a push, so I thought of the idea of having some debris in the water and thought that branches would work well. I went in Maya and exported some branches from the trees I modelled and placed them around my scene positioning them how I thought looked best. I also reused some of the trees and scaled them down to try and give more of a variant. I feel this as worked quite well and has really added to my scene.

I have also made the base higher poly by first selecting the mesh and pressing the 3 button which shows a preview of what a high poly version looks like. I then converted this so it was real, at first I was unsure about doing this as it was quite high poly and I was worried it would slow down UE4 but I found out that UE4 could handle quite alot, so when I exported this back in I was happy to discover it didnt change the frame rate at all.
Doing this has made the transition from ground to water much smoother and look so much better.

This is what it now looks like in scene with the new ground.

One final update is that I have improved my helmets, I have now made them much higher poly with a smoother edge. This has defiantly made them look better. 

This is how it now looks in scene all scattered around.