2D Week 9: Group Project (Shape Language) - Team Tinman

 Week 9 Shape Language

Continuing on our wizard of OZ group project, we are focus on analysis shape language and creating proxy for both character and environment.

Since the whole class is working as a group, source control is our best friend. Paul and me set up the folder structure in perforce for our class.We created 3 main folders which separate our 2d files, maya files and UE4 files.  Learn from previous Lego project, we figured we should create sub folders for each team in each main folder. Therefore when we sync files with perforce we would only need to worry about our group folders in each main folder. This would save time and storage for the class.

For Tinman group, I was assigned to do the layout in UE4.

Thanks to Kay, I got  this procedural generated forest which is super cool and helpful for set dressing a large forest scene. One thing I notice is that the trees are all exactly same and the whole forest is one mesh in UE4. I wish we can have some variations in trees. We will definitely look into that when we move on to next stage. But for now, this is just awesome and make my job 10 times easier for doing layout in the proxy stage.

Then I made this Blue print with the leaves and branches so that I can scale the whole forest up without messing things up.

Here I begin with bringing the ground geometry and forest  into the level and pick an area to focus on. 

Before I place the set dressing pieces Leah and Will made and Boo's proxy character, we did a simple scene with everything in there and test it out in VR so that we can get a sense of scale. After we figure out the exact scale we want, we have everyone fix their pieces. After I re-import the fixed meshes, I assigned a very basic material for everything. Then I did the layout.

Then I hand my level over to Leah. She did the lighting for the scene. We try to use both set dressing pieces and lighting to direct player's eyes.

Time spend: 3-4 hour