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.

Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires

This week as a group we pooled our efforts together to create the first main room of our game: Duncan's Room. This room was to be completely finished this week, in order to serve as both a benchmark for the rest of the game, and as a way of judging how much time we need to dedicate to the creation of other rooms in the game.

Ellie spent the week finishing and texturing the assets she had begun working on last week. She made several variations of some of the assets, to allow for choice and variety when populating the world. It was also a good exercise in studying material definition, and growing the skills to really push texturing. To make the texturing pipeline for these assets quicker, she used a combination of Quixel Suite's DDO, and Substance Painter, allowing for fast procedural texturing, but with still enough control to not make it feel like a pre-made texture slapped on.

Chris continued working on assets much the same as last week, although through practice this has been speeding up over time. Some assets have needed to be revisited and some still will need to be again, such as the cupboard requiring more detail, but for the moment the assets are certainly usable in the level.

Hazel worked on the bed this week; it took longer than she thought it would because of problems with unwrapping but it was finished by Friday. 

We had some issues with Liv’s stone wall normals- the normals were too subtle and so weren't showing up in such a dark room. Hazel offered to take it into zbrush and sculpt in some more exaggerated rocks with turned out looking much better. 

(Liv)

Carrie has been finishing off the concepts to be worked from in the rest of the castle:

 The Hallway leading to the Stage;

 The Banquet Hall for the Stage of Banquo's cycle;

 The Theatre, this time with the audience seated - the actual positions of the audience members will probably be decided when we are placing them in engine;

 The doors in the entrance hall which lead to the different Stages per cycle - also designed the engravings on the plaques to differentiate the doors and symbolise what lies beyond;

The Coat of Arms based on the real Macbeth family crest, though changed and drawn out by hand, to be put on banners and shields etc. (as seen in the banquet hall concept).

In addition to the concepting, Carrie created an animated material for the benchmark room (and the rest of the castle) which would emulate a beam of light illuminating dust motes in the beam - aka. god rays/ light shafts etc. In the benchmark room it is being used for the spotlight beam.


It was a busy week on the engine side of things this week as everyone's (more or less) finished assets were put into engine to create a benchmark room so that we had some sort of quality guide to aim for when creating the rest of our game.

Jacob created some particle effect candle lights as well as lit the room using warm, orange lighting as well as some harsh artificial lighting you would expect to see in a theatre/on a stage. This, paired with a manually made light shaft created my Carrie and positioned by Jacob we managed to create a good looking spotlight for our stage room (it had to be manually made as light shafts for spot and point lights are yet to be implemented into UE4).

Below are some high-res beauty screenshots of our benchmark room so far. In these screenshots we are still missing the assets for the swords and dagger. We also ran into some problems when it came to the lighting on the bed (visible on the ties around the bed). This is definitely something we will be asking about next time we get the chance as we felt it really throws the whole room off once you notice it.

Other than this benchmark room, we also added a slight bit of fog to the exterior of the level, as well as introduced the mechanic that allows the player to move through to the next level once he's finished the current one.

 Next week the team splits in half for 6 weeks with one half working on characters and the other on environment. Although we’re all going to be working on different things it's going to be important that we stay in the loop and are constantly checking each other’s work.