To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus

Hazel:

This week our team has been split because of trips home for easter although we all have work that we'll be getting on with during that time.

For me this week has been a week full of juggling again; I wanted to texture Macduff and rig him by the end of this week but I also had responsibility of the engine file again to add in some features such as a handheld candle light and a slightly different lighting set up to the one we had previously.

Since this week was the third week of my character I really needed it finished if I wanted to stay on schedule.

 I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy with the texture but with the clock ticking I really needed to move on and commit to coming back to him during polish week.

After struggling for most of the day with rigging I came across Mixamo which rigs for you- although I want practice with rigging I'd rather practice when I actually have the time to!

I decided to go ahead and check the textures in unreal and I had such a hard time when they turned out looking absolutely awful with nothing I could apparently do to fix it. I eventually worked out I had imported my normal map incorrectly but I decided when I work on Macbeth I'll check his textures in Unreal rather than Marmoset; in short, Marmoset spoils me.

Between texture exports I worked on our engine as I mentioned earlier, and I'm much happier with it now.

Here's some screenshots of Macduff in engine as well; although I'm not entirely happy with him at the moment I can't afford to not move on.

Ellie:

This week I was at home visiting family for Easter, and so unfortunately no noteworthy progress was made due to a lack of access to necessary resources to continue working. Progress will resume next week!

Carrie: Also visiting home over Easter.

Jacob:

First job for this week was to get the interior model finished so that it could be imported into engine to be textured. It was tricky but in the end I managed to do it with both parts as one mesh to try and avoid light leakages once it's in engine.

One it was remodelled I spoke to my team to figure out what textures would be going on what part of the model. After this discussion I applied a multi-sub material to the model which would accommodate for these textures.

We eventually came to a total of seven different textures to use in various places. These textures were: plain stone, stone wall, plain wood, wooden planks, emissive white, non-reflective black and the texture going on the wall of the theatre.

I also started texturing the terrain this week, and I came across a fairly annoying problem. Whenever I paint any one of three specific textures over three specific tiles for the terrain, the whole terrain texture disappears and we as a group have no idea why.

Above is the gravel texture of our map being painted on one tile, and below you can see what happens when I can on this same texture over to the tile directly next to it.

At the moment this problem will probably have to go on the back burner until next week and hopefully we'll be able to find a solution.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?

This week was a mix of a lot of different things for the team; some were continuing working on their characters while others worked on assets/engine.

Something that needed to be submitted this week was the benchmark room which we had already done but had identified needing polishing.

This week Hazel worked on baking Macduff but then switched to polishing her bed and working a little in the engine.

 The bake came out pretty well but it needs quite a bit of polishing and cleaning up.

Hazel then had to stop to do some work on our benchmark room, which was easier said than done; she needed to make sheets to drape over a sleeping King Duncan but texturing them was incredibly difficult; for some reason it just seems impossible to make convincing looking fabric.

This issue was put this issue down originally to the harsh lighting of the spotlight in the engine, so she played around with lighting to try and get the bed looking better but that unfortunately didn't work.

Hazel put in the updated bed in and played with the player's height and also made the character hold a light source (a candle) so that the scene lit up a little bit when you walked closer.

These are the screenshots for the benchmark room. The lighting came out much darker than when it was open in labs, so Hazel isn't particularly pleased with it. This is definitely something Hazel would like the team to come back to at some point perhaps during polish week.

Ellie spent this week beginning to create Lady Macbeth's sculpt, aiming to bring it up to around the same progress that was achieved with King Duncan's sculpt that was completed last week. She used the same process as before, creating the body sculpt in ZBrush, before importing that to Marvelous Designer to create the clothing, then flipping back into ZBrush for cleaning up. However, due to other work that was necessary during the week, such as a presentation and poster, progress did not go past importing the clothing created in marvelous designer.

Next week, she will finish Lady Macbeth's sculpt, and will also begin to retopologise her models if time allows it.

Jacob's work for the week:

The beginning of this week (as I think was the case with most people) was spent mostly preparing for a presentation we had to give to do with your last project, so not too much progress has been this week.

As you can see I have mainly just been continuing with the modelling of the interior of the castle which turned out to be more challenging than I had thought. I had some trouble figuring out how how to attach some of the walls together as I wanted to avoid any single planes overlapping if possible.  I also had to make sure the corridor part of the map to the theatre were a separate mesh as these had to be moved depending on what level they were in.

As you can see I also made some simple pillars. One for the corridor, and another slightly different one for the theatre.

This is a couple of weeks old but I forgot to include it. These are a couple of swords and the dagger I created for the coat of arms and Duncan's room. The normals and roughness on the above capture may be a little off as I'm still trying to get used to Marmoset Toolbag.


Carrie:
Resculpting Banquo's clothes

Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it.

With this week came the start of the team splitting off into their specialisations; with Ellie, Hazel, and Carrie working on characters, and Liv, Jacob, and Chris working on the environment and the assets to populate it.

Ellie began to work on King Duncan, modelling from Carrie's concept as reference. In the end we chose to round out the shape of the concepted beard slightly as it was looking a bit too stylised otherwise when sculpted. A base sculpt was created in ZBrush to get the body proportions and the face right, then this was exported to Marvelous Designer to create the clothing. The clothes were then taken back into Zbrush for heavy polishing. The crown was created in 3DSMax, and detailed in ZBrush. Duncan's sculpt was around 90% completed this week, with just some polishing and another detail pass to go. She has also been tasked with creating Lady Macbeth's model, and will work on the two in tandem, taking them through each stage of model creation together.

This week Hazel worked on Macduff. She used a mix of Marvelous Designer, Zbrush and 3DS Max. We all checked up on each other's work to make sure we were keeping a similar style and level of detail while sharing brushes for things like pores.

Hazel also created a large asset list for the rest of the environment. It's quite a lot of work so handing out all the assets and making sure they're done on schedule will be important.


Carrie began work on Banquo - starting with the base mesh (which began as z-spheres), then working on the face.

Carrie also worked in marvellous designer to create the base for the clothing - there were various issues along the way so the result is incomplete.

With more research into tunic patterns and how to use Marvellous Designer, the clothing - tunic especially - may be completely redone. All in all, though, MD sped up the process tremendously despite the lacking knowledge of how to use it properly.


Jacob (written by himself):

So the terrain of the levelled was modified to something that is closer to being called finished. I made the terrain itself smaller, then more dense, and then I fixed a lot of the stretching before making it larger and less dense again. There is still some stretching but this might be a good thing as it may add some variety to the tileable cliff texture.

I then followed a tutorial and created a grass texture from scratch in Substance Designer which I feel would fit well into our level as it's a fairly realistic texture with some touches of stylisation. I also set up the texture to have modifiable parameters such as density, rotation, lengths and width.

I then put that texture (and a cliff texture I created in Bitmap 2 Material and Photoshop) into a terrain material that is ready to apply when I get the chance.

I applied some lighting to the corridor leading to the stage room just to make from progress with the lighting as a whole. The dreaded peach lighting has made a return which seems to be an inconsistent problem so hopefully we'll find a solution to that soon.

Due to the fact that we had light leaking through some of our level last week, I started to remodel the interior of the castle and theatre in 3ds Max as hopefully this will help the light leaking. Hopefully it will help with the texturing too.

This week Chris created some additional assets, such as a barrel, additional variants of books and a first pass at some apples for the banquet table. Some previous assets were also revisited, with additional detail being added to some such as the cupboard in the form of hinges, handles and metal detailing. He also took all the wooden assets he had created and introduced some consistency into the wood, giving the wooden assets intended to be outside a more de-saturated look, and those intended to be inside a more bright and saturated appearance.