Ice Cream Is Deadly

This week/Monday marks the end of the Sentry Gun project and the start of the next one, however I'll mention that later. 

In my last blog post I talked about modelling and the dreaded baking, thankfully the topic this week is texturing, engine and any additional work I did throughout the week, which is much less stressful than baking.

The cart, barrel and pivot were all on the same 1024 texture sheet. So I started off by painting the albedo for these assets, a fairly simple texture was all I did however when I'd finished I realised the wood texture I had painted was really rubbish and didn't look as stylised as I'd originally wanted so I went back and re-painted it. I'm a lot happier with the outcome after re painting it.
A lot of the detail for the assets actually came from the normal and roughness maps. The cart's umbrella relied heavily on the normal map I made from the baked height map, as did the barrel and each part of the asset that had the wood texture on it.
The roughness maps were equally as important as it made the assets slightly glossy giving them a cute and smooth look which is what I wanted, although also giving the detail of scratches and other damage to make it slightly more realistic too.

Whilst in the process of texturing I continually checked each texture in engine, this helped me review the texture in the lighting I was going to use and make sure it looked exactly how I wanted. By doing this I was able to make the changes I needed to get the right final outcome. 

After making and adjusting the textures for each asset, I finally imported the models into the sentry gun scene that was made for us. It took me awhile to figure out how to swap out the pre-made model for my own but I got it in the end. I thought I had an issue with the barrel not firing the projectile but I found out that I had to make a socket named "Barrel_01" and put it in front of the barrel for it to shoot, I did so and it still wouldn't work. It turned out that I had accidentally put the socket too far into the barrel instead of outside the mesh. After fixing this it work just fine, I did however decide to change how fast the projectile was shot out so the player could actually see that the projectile is ice cream. 

As additional work I decided to add some audio. To do so I found an appropriate audio file which for my sentry gun would be an ice cream splat, I then downloaded the .wav file and imported it into the audio folder in UE4. 

After importing the file I created a Sound Cue and edited the blueprints to make it work correctly. 

The quality of the audio isn't very good so it doesn't sound much like a splat but I think it sounds good enough for someone to tell what it is.

For some more additional work I also made quick environment for my sentry gun to make the renders look more interesting. I did this also because my sentry gun looks slightly odd in the generic environment as it's an ice cream cart that shoots ice cream. I chose to make a path and some grass on a plane underneath the sentry gun to make it look like it belonged in the scene more. I did this additional work quite quickly so it's not amazing but it does the job.

Here are some extra beauty renders: 

Before I forget, the next project is Dichotomy Characters. For this we have to design two opposite characters. It sounds really interesting as we have a lot of freedom with what we can design and the budget we want to use! However I'm also not looking forward to it too much as I'm not really looking to be a character artist and I don't find making them very fun or interesting but we'll see, it may change my mind!