Presenting the Cart

 05-06/01/22 - Week 14

For the cart's presentation, I wanted to continue with the lighting I had set up before, add in my final models and textures and possibly add in a particle system.

Before I imported everything, I quickly sorted out the issue with the plums mentioned before, deleted some topology on the fruit that wasn't showing to create more room in the budget, and added in the pineapple leaves which I had somehow forgotten about until now. I ended up with a tri count of around 5.5k which I felt was acceptable for the tri budget given, this means that my cart is around 8k, 500 extra tris on each part of the model than the suggested.

I found some issues almost instantly for the cart project, I had a lot of issues with lighting and errors that were presented in the log. These were mainly a combination of overlapping lighting maps and "wrapping" uvs on the lightmap. I hadn't come across the latter but it was basically the same fix as the former so it wasn't too difficult to fix in the end. The main issues came with the cart's light maps, I hadn't set them up before merging my fruit, baskets and foliage so I tried to just adjust it with it merged but I had found that as I had merged it had messed with my mesh quite badly and even xforming and unmerging everything still caused problems. When trying to unwrap it would consistently crash the program, and the auto-generated maps weren't any better. In the end, I had to solve this by making the fruit part of the cart a stationary mesh instead of static. As far as I can tell, this doesn't effect the mesh apart from it being a bit less efficient since it doesn't use a light map and the lighting is processed much like a stationary light source. Hopefully this is an acceptable quick fix that does not effect the efficiency too highly. This has taught me that I need to think about light maps earlier on and create them as I am unwrapping instead of coming back to it when I need to.

After fixing my light map errors, I moved on to adjusting the lighting to the final variant. I didn't think I'd end up changing much but in the end I moved the main "street light" to the middle to get better lighting on the cart and changed the rect light in the door to a point light. I then felt something was missing - I wanted the light coming from the door and shopfront window to be glowing more realistically as if a light was on inside, this would help the realism. I achieved this by creating an alpha map in my shop front textures for the area around the bottles and added in a colour to my materials for the emissive colour, making the alpha the emissive opacity. For the door I just added a plane and added the same material for the light, adjusting it slightly using a mat instance.

I then added in a cascade fx, this was the same idea for the character project and had a lot of the same settings implemented to make it look like a dust of sorts. I made it a warm orange to match the lighting's glow. I feel this made the project a lot more peaceful and serene. 

Overall, I'm very happy with the results of the lighting and how I was able to overcome some of the problems that were presented. If I could, I would have perhaps spent a bit longer on it tweaking and improving things such as the particle fx and glass especially, as this didn't turn out as I wanted it in many ways. I should have kept the glass to its own map so I could mess with the shader individually instead of having to keep in mind the non-glass objects on the texture sheet.