Well technically they weren’t lost… Just couldn’t access my blog to update it.
Blog – Software
Over the past few weeks I’ve looked at what software I might end up using, one is the Unreal 4 Engine as I have an interest in games it may in fact be a good output to use, however this will alter my project when it comes to rendering. From a few discussions and a brief look into why this is, I’ve found that it is to do with the number of polygons that can be calculated at a time (Or at least this is my understanding) more polys need more processing power and this demands more system resources; this may explain why some games have flat looking assets. Now the main thing to consider here is whether I go for making game assets or stick with something for film, either way this decision should have been made last week, but I have been too preoccupied with thinking of a theme. When it comes to PBR (Physically Based Rendering) it may require less system resources and may be a little less ‘complicated’ (as a comparison) to make a mini show-reel of around a minute to show the assets I have made. OR perhaps it’d be best to make this into a year-long project and have this first semester to learn the software and model most of the assets I have begun planning out; then in the second semester I could try creating two outputs, one a showreel of the assets but perhaps also a level of no more than a few rooms in the Unreal Engine to demonstrate any transferable skills I will of (hopefully) obtained along the way.
With that ramble out of the way, the other software I’m looking at is Substance B2M this was highlighted by James in the Games Engine Workshop masterclass from Wednesday, next week I believe we are looking at Substance painter. B2M is quite interesting because it allows us to take a simple image and turn it into a material, in the workshop we used the Unreal Engine as part of the pipeline however I don’t see why this couldn’t be used to make materials for other substance programs before rendering out the final painted project. This may help speed up the painting stage of the project by allowing me to make a material from a stock image rather than have to spend hours on Photoshop in order to make something totally new.