Week 6 Progress

After last weeks critiques, a decision was made to make massive changes to the project. The project changes consist of changing our environments entire layout as well as the lighting. We also improved upon previous versions of the bottle in order to get a more accurate depiction of the bottle.

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Environment

Like before I was put in charge of the environment. We decided as a group that the new environment should resemble our previous version by reusing the assets we already had in the content folder of the project. We wanted to keep the adding of new assets to a minimum in order to not strain our projects files. To begin this process. I decided to start looking up references for our layout and overall atmosphere.

Since we were requested to greatly expand the environment in order to get a since atmosphere. We decided to not place out bottle at ground level, but instead to place it on the edge of a cliff looking out onto a massive mountain range. This was achieved by dividing up our environment into sections (foreground, middle ground, background). I had to experiment and adjust the terrain in the middle ground in order to achieve to achieve a more "scenic" environment. We also had to adjust the material on the middle ground as well since it didn't blend in with the surrounding environment material.

Before:

After:

For the foreground we utilized our megascan assets since it would be the part of the landscape that would require the most attention to detail. For the middle ground and background we utilized massive terrain assets from unreal marketplace and other sources. The fog effect was achieved by utilizing a package called "easyfog" from the unreal marketplace.

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Issues

Issue #1: Lit Channel Error

Since our glass material only works in pathtracer, a majority of our renders were done in the pathtracer channel. We didn't notice until later in the week when the landscape material for the middle ground had a weird glowing effect in the lit channel.

We are stil currently troubleshooting the issue to see what exactly is causing the issue. It may be a simple solution of just rebuilding the material from scratch, but we want to see what specifically caused the issue in order to prevent future errors like this from happening again.