2D Week 11 - Level Iteration and Research

Much of my time this week was spent experimenting and researching like a good tech artist. The first half of my time was spent going back and forth between Unreal and the VR station trying to get a good feel for the scale of the level. I was able to get the navmesh working on the level, so we could explore the space better. It still felt too wide, but not to the degree that you had thought in class. I do think that it looks better at the new scaling though, and changing out the walls in the main area made it feel more grand and imposing.

As for the research, I had four main topics I wanted to look into this week:
1) Having an effect on the floor to simulate the effect of glass or some other translucent material, with a host of corpse giblets beneath. Using Ben Crawford's Shaders 201 talk from GDC2017, I was able to get this effect working, but the values will need to be significantly experimented with once I have the actual textures.

2) I also looked at Ben's 2016 shader talk to try and use his environmental effect shader (which he uses to get grass always facing world-up on an object) to be able to cheat the flesh lattice effect and save on geometry. I was not able to figure a way to do it for this week, so for now that will have to be accounted for in the geometry budget.

3) Something that had been talked about and Cat put in her sketches was godrays. I have found a tutorial for how to create them in UE4, and used sparingly they should be able to not crash the framerate while adding a definite ambiance to the scene. Also, in my research I discovered that the nature of the lenses in some VR headsets causes a "natural" god ray effect, but I think we would prefer one we can control.

4) Finally, I looked into SpaceScape, a program that will allow us to create a more unique skybox to truly sell that space feeling. I feel comfortable with the program, however I will need to meet with Zach to get the specifics of his vision down.