Sprint #4 Delivery, Asset/Feature Complete

 

For this sprint, we did a ton of polishing. We worked hard to get the boat movement on a spline which we successfully were able to make happen! I did the boat rotation along the spline and I added the fireflies to the boat spline as well. I fixed the lantern gravity and mass. And I helped with destroying the fireflies once they were in a trigger box.

Sprint 3 - Delivery, Sound & VFX

 

For this sprint, I added a firefly VFX to guide the player through the experience. I have it attached to a spline which will eventually get attached to the boat spline. The fireflies are on their own blueprint currently with their own timeline. I also optimized the lanterns so the shader complexity isn't as bad to improve performance. 

Sprint 2 - Beginning, Middle, and End Part II

 

For this sprint, I completely redid the lantern particle systems. We moved from Niagara to Cascade. I got the fade in and fade out of the particles working and Laura created the trigger box system that spawns the lanterns from the boats. I also created the begin and end fades and helped Laura set that up in blueprints. I also helped with the lantern spawning blueprint that gets called when the player overlaps the trigger box.

Sprint 1 - Beginning, Middle, and End Part I

 

For this sprint, I created the level sequencer that fades the level in and out, I added interactable lanterns around the boat (this is still a work in progress, but the functionality is there), and I cleaned up the lighting and atmospheric fog a bit.

Week 13 - White Boxing and Concept (Part 01)

For this week, I worked on the visual effects slides for the PowerPoint and I worked on the lantern particle system a bit more. I made the particles more spread out and had them spawn in a square. I tested 100 particles vs. 200 particles. 200 particles drops the frame rate after a bit, so I think we're going to stick with using just 100 particles. For next week, I'm going to work on making the particles spawn in a volume and have them spawn from a specific point to fan out into the volume.

Week 12 - Art Style Guide (Custom Style Guide/Starting Prototype)

 

For this week, I helped create the visual effects and technical considerations slides of our PowerPoint. I also created a test particle system using Niagara for the lanterns. I used a cylindrical static mesh and spawned 100 of them. I started with 200 initially, but that didn't work well with VR, so I cut it in half. I also created a water material. I would like to still work on the reflectivity of it, but I wanted something in the project now to simulate what the water will kind of look like. I also created the naming conventions documentation for our team, so we can have cohesive naming structure.

Week 11 - Art Style Guides (Discovering Your Own Art Style)

 

For this week, I helped create the lighting, vfx, and special design considerations slides. We focused on what the scene we are planning to create was going to look like as well as only keeping that in mind for all of our analyses. Our main focus for these slides was the natural lighting, the particle effects (fire and lanterns) as well as the water and atmospheric fog, and the sitting down/first person considerations in VR.