Shimin Cong MA 3D Computer animation

Game demonstration video：https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV16q4y1U7Dg

Game link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1DT2peFlAipxZEtALpQ0qEw

Passport: 4gy9 

Music

First of all, Little Devil’s music comes from Gris’s background music. In addition, I also added some underwater music to combine.

The editing of music in the game engine is relatively simple, we only need to modify its volume. Of course there are some special effects. For example, the sound only appears in a certain area. And as the distance gets farther, the sound will become smaller and smaller.

UI

Little Devil’s UI is relatively small. The main UI includes loading interface, death interface, energy slot, start the game, continue the game, and some text prompts.

As for the production of energy tanks, the material aspect is the most. The reason is that I need to control a parameter to make it decay linearly.

An important element in the ocean landscape-fish. The atmosphere of the game and the atmosphere of the game.

Source From

This is the case of the game-fish-like alternating system. However, there is a problem that exists, and it is a true problem. Opposite this is in PS.

In addition ，I also add Emission color in unreal for fish.

Lighting modification

First of all, I improved the sky tone on the basis of the original pink sky. Make it more blue. As for the details of the lighting. I added different points of light around the luminous plants. In addition, I also added some Spot lights to simulate the noise of sunlight hitting the bottom of the sea.

The above is the final result of completion.

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/82682271

The interaction is implemented by referring to the details in the link above.

Interactive Sand

The reason why I did this interaction is that I saw the character walking in the snow level in the Wind Journey Man, leaving footprints on the snow as he walked. For this, I found relevant production tutorials on Youtube.

But the interactive effect in this production tutorial is not very good. Its limitation is that the collision space is limited to the plane. As for my terrain, it is complicated and uneven. I am still looking for a solution to this. However, when I adjusted the height of a certain interaction space, I found that 80% of the area can be interacted normally.

The effect is mainly to use the function of Unreal’s virtual texture.

The two pictures above are Sand’s virtual texture material and sand surface material.

Two of the key things are Runtime virtual Texture and Virtual Textural Volume blueprint which can specify the scope of the interactive space.

Character BluePrint: I preset the collision body capsule to trigger the displacement effect of the virtual texture when the speed is greater than 50. The depth of its displacement and the radius of influence need to be controlled by the internal parameters of the sand shader.

The above is the content of this week’s work, as well as all the technical analysis of the game scene production. In the next two weeks and vacation time. I will study the game role blueprint and game interaction and UI blueprint.

This stage is to make more detailed interactive animations, including the color change of plants after the character approaches, and the animation of the water snake retracting to the ground after the character approaches. These interactive effects are based on game works such as Flower and ABZU as a reference.

Snake

Interactive Plants

The material node for this effect is shown below. In addition to controlling the displacement of the world, we can influence the color through computation.

Texturing in Unreal

AI BehaviorTree in Unreal

After making a simple AI automatic patrol, I found that Monster Fish’s patrol path is based on the ground, which is not suitable for aquatic creatures. So I thought about having Monster Fish patrol the path of the spline. When Monster spots a first player, it moves in the player’s direction and triggers an attack animation. When Monster loses the player, it follows the original path back to the spline and continues its patrol.

However, this is only the logic of a simple patrol attack. As for the action, it is not harmonious. I believe there will be a better solution in the future.

Modeling in Zbrush

OnWrapping in Rizom UV

Texturing in Substance Painter

Rigging with Advanced Skeleton5

Animating in MAYA

This monster includes two attack animations, a death animation, a swimming animation, and an idle state animation.

Texturing in Unreal

I want to use the material’s World Positon offset to create the movement effect for the character’s hair. I used the Simple Grass Wind node for this. Attention should be paid to the head of UV and mask drawing.

Animation BluePrint in Unreal

This picture is an animation space in Unreal. Used for smooth transition of swimming in different directions. Only in this way can the switching between the two swimming actions be more natural and harmonious.

Animation state machines can make transitions from action to action more natural. The nodes shown above are a basic production flow for swimming. The detailed production process can be found on Youtube.

One of the abilities that this character has in mind is invisibility.  So I made a custom change material in the blueprint.

Modeling

According to the background of the story, the character is set as an abstract cute elf. This is a design of the character on land. In this Level, the character is in the water, so there is no clothes.

Rigging with Advanced Skeleston5

Animating with HumanIK

I used the swimming action from the Unreal Official Store for the character animation. Use HuanmIK to quickly get a basic swimming animation. However, there will be many mistakes in such animation, which needs us to adjust manually. Parts of the skeleton can be quickly modified using the Animation Layer.

The above is all the actions of the character. These actions include surface, underwater, fast swimming and slow swimming.

In the early days of the FMP project, I was always wondering whether to remake a new game. Luke Bridger said: As long as it fits my career plan, my choice will not be wrong. Considering the upcoming employment. I focused my work on continuing to make game projects that were not completed in Term3. Thank you Luke for supporting me. Give me time to complete such a huge project.

My FMP will continue the development of Term3 project. In Term3, my main work content is the production of game models and special effects resources and the editing of game scenes. In the final study, I will delve into the game interaction and the realization of the overall game.

In the first stage of this semester, I started from scene optimization. For artists, without technical support, game scene optimization is mainly reflected in the production of LOD and the adjustment of vegetation density.

The following are 3 different landforms completed.

The purpose of these changes is twofold:

• 1.Adjust the atmosphere of the game.
• 2.Save performance, save enough running space for subsequent interactive content addition.

The content of the Conclusion paragraph should include the following points:

1. Reiterate the research question. Then, state how your findings (if any) answer this question.
2. Link the findings to the topics or questions you raised in the introduction.
3. If there are unexpected discoveries, you can also explain according to your own methods, which sometimes leads to a reconstructed hypothesis, or even rewrite the introduction.
4. Explain in detail the main conclusions of the article, which may include the theoretical and practical significance of personal research. This is essentially evaluating your findings.
5. Finally, we can discuss how these effects affect future research and conduct research for future researchers. You might even want to outline the steps they will take.

Conclusion

In short, lighting design is an important subject for game development. For games, lighting plays a key role in creating the atmosphere of the scene, the sense of story, the embodiment of different textures and the sense of immersion. In the industrial pipeline, lighting artists often achieve visual effects through the lighting system in the engine, Reflection Probe, fog and some environmental effects. For immersive games, designers often want the game to affect the player’s emotions, which in turn produces a good experience. Or even become a long-lasting game player group. But the realm of human emotions is vast and multi-layered, and cannot be touched by narrative alone. The role of emotions in computer games goes far beyond these limited approaches; emotions are the primary source of human motivation and behavior (De Byl, 2015). Therefore lighting, as the last major aspect of game art, is crucial to the player’s emotions. And it needs to be closely fitted with all other departments.

Constraints

There are three constraints that affect the game lighting effect the most. Firstly, the creator’s artistic aesthetics and color sensitivity are the most important factors affecting the game art effect. The second is the lighting artist’s mastery of the theory and techniques of lighting, reason color theory, light source direction for the evening emotion, etc. The first two factors can be supplemented with the accumulation of work experience. Game lighting compared to photographers and film lighting, but also should be more consideration of the game’s own properties. In addition, the third factor affecting the game lighting is the hardware as well as the software itself. Lighting for large games has always been a challenge for game developers, mainly in developing faster and more efficient lighting calculations (Martin, 2018). Often, game technical art provides game lighting artists with appropriate fog plug-ins, as well as modifying lighting properties in the engine to optimize the rendering approach. The support of these technologies will allow the lighting artist to escape from the performance as well as functional limitations of the game and thus create more possibilities.

5.2. Reflection and future work

Video and computer games are the most complex forms of interactive media (Seif El-Nasr, Niedenthal, Kenz, Almeida & Zupko, 2006). Indeed, in the process of game production, the producer has to satisfy not only the aesthetics of the game but also the desires of the player. In the little Devil project, there are many flaws here for the immersion of the game. In terms of lighting include the following points. First of all, the project has many lights that can be optimized. These lights have a small impact on the scene effect, and the radius of the lights is too large. This results in a waste of performance. In addition, there is a lot of controversy in the lighting techniques and colors of the project, mainly due to the uncertainty of the project atmosphere. In addition, because the project is produced by the Unreal default system. Therefore, in the development stage was subject to technical limitations, such as the lack of fog plug-ins. In addition to the flaws in the lighting. As a game, Little Devil should focus more on the game play, after all, the immersion of the game is affected by the game play, the game scene effect, the game music and the game UI of many factors together. Although there are many shortcomings here, it is not a bad thing to find flaws. It is the planned improvement that is more important to focus on. Therefore, as a newcomer to the industry, to become a qualified lighting artist to participate in the immersive game, the first should understand more about color theory, as well as lighting techniques and try more good works, which can enhance the aesthetic ability of the producer skills. In short, nowadays, as the game market continues to expand, as well as the upgrading of hardware and software for game development, game lighting will gradually get rid of the pressure brought by the technology. Therefore, it is crucial for lighting artists to improve their artistic aesthetic ability and understand the nature of the game.