Environment and lighting (12th May)

In my pitch document I stated that I wanted to use procedural generation in my game which is an experimental tool provided by UE4. The procedural tool allows you to select which foliage you want to use and then generates that foliage in a set range, with this tool I created all of foliage in the environment. Another tool that UE4 provides is a foliage blocker which will stop any foliage being created on these areas, this was really usefully when creating pathways around the level. By using procedural generation I was easily able to produce my forest really quickly saving me lot of time on the level allowing me to focus on equally critical components of the game like the UI.

Using procedural generation tool:

Issues:

With creating the environment there was only one real issue and that was the performance rate, which was lacking due to the vast amount of trees and complicated lighting going on in the scene, to combat the issues with the help of a tech I was able to adjust the loading distance of the trees and also added in fog to help mask this and to add atmosphere to the game. An additional issue I have with performance is that I have a gaming PC which enables me to build these graphically intense games, but as this game is targeting a large range of people who mostly are unlikely to have a graphically powerful computer this could potential cause issues with performance that I won’t be aware of. The only way around this issue would be to have access to another computer that wasn’t designed to deal with high quality graphics.

Lighting:

Lighting was a real issue with this project and was a problem that I never really solved, the issue that I was having was that some of the the trees in the scene would turn completely black. I messed around with the direction of the light and the intensity along with changing the lighting resolution on the tree meshes themselves, but the it was still an issue.

Black Tree lighting issue

In the end I decided to run a build to see what the game looked like without building the lighting and was really impressed with how the game looked. I then built the lighting and ran the game again and asides from the tree issue the forest was to dark and instead of giving off a nice peaceful go and explore atmosphere it rather gave a spooky/ haunted forest look, which definitely didn’t match the purpose of the game.

With Lighting baked:

With lighting not baked:

As you can see from the two images the bottom forest is a lot more inviting and makes you want to go and explore, this is why I decided to stick with this in the game as overall I felt this look really matched the purpose and feel of the intended experience.

Overall thoughts:

Overall I am really happy with how the environment turned out and with procedural generation it meant creating a complicated forest network like this really simple *(procedural generation is definitely a tool I will be using in future projects). With the lighting I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t reach a solution, but with how the game turned out the shadows and the overall lighting in the scene really matches the aesthetic of the game and the environment really makes you want to go and explore.

#GAM704ExperimentalGames