6. Final Project – Iterative Development

Posted byDragosPosted inUncategorized

This blog will go over all of the tools learned for the creation of the project and will follow the iterations that the final artefact has been through. While the environment was being created, it has been continuously shown to multiple people for feedback, thus ensuring a continuous iterative cycle.

After conducting research into possible assets, I had initially settled on using one asset pack, called Procedural Nature Pack Vol.1 (PurePolygons, 2015), as it has been said in the Prototyping blog. On top of this, I also discovered that if I needed to, I could use imported assets from Quixel Megascans, which are photoscanned, optimized, game-ready meshes.

While they initially appeared to work well in the demo scene provided by the creator, which was packaged for UnrealEngine 4.8, the foliage assets caused issues in the much more recent version of UnrealEngine, 4.24, which I was using. These issues consisted mainly in drastically reduced frame rate and excessive rendering times for lighting. Thus, I had to look for new assets for the trees, and resorted to using TreeIt (Evolved Software, 2020) for its bamboo trees, having access to four different versions of them. While the bamboo trees were not what I had initially planned, and they did not entirely resemble the vegetation that I had shown on the moodboard, these were at least temporary solutions to vegetation that could be found in a rainforest.

In order to create an environment, the first thing that needed to be done was to create a landscape (Fig.23). This was done using UnrealEngine’s Landscape editor, using a Quixel Megascans texture for the ground. After multiple attempts, I managed to create a convincing landscape, consisting in a slope, at the base of which I created a running river by using the aforementioned procedural nature pack, which had a spline-based river as well, and which did not seem to pose any problem performance-wise. The procedural river tool was strange to use at first, because I could not find a way to make the spline any longer than a two-point spline, and furthermore the shading of the running water seemed to have issues if the water was not perfectly horizontal. After learning how to use it better, I created a river along the river bank that I had previously created using the landscape sculpting tools. The reason for which a river was introduced is because, according to a study on preference towards scenic beauty by Han (2007), water is favoured by the participants. From an evolutionary standpoint, this may be due to rivers and lakes being an important source of food and water. Below in Fig. 23 and 24, there are screenshots of the landscape in this state.

 Fig.23 Landscape shape – top view
Fig.24 Landscape with River – top view

After creating the landscape, it needed to be populated with trees, so I used the Foliage tool that comes with Unreal Engine 4. After going through some of the settings of this tool, such as density, which governs how many trees there will be in one click of the brush, as well as size, which governs the range of the click of a brush would be. Each piece of foliage which was going to be used had to first be loaded into the toolbar, after which each piece had individual settings to be used. The main one that I used was the scale tool, in order to make the bamboo much taller than it was originally imported. The empty hill, which can be seen in Fig.25, was to be populated by an unusually large tree, which would be the primary awe-inducing factor as well as a landmark, and according to Allen (2018), would be the factor which would trigger the “perceived vastness” component of awe. An unusually large tree was chosen because, according to Keltner and Haidt (2003), “vastness refers to anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self’s ordinary level of experience”, and a gigantic tree would not break immersion, as it is not completely unheard of for trees to be much larger than the average tree, but it would still challenge the viewer’s experience.

Fig.25 Environment with cave, bamboo vegetation and spline-based river – top view

After showing this build to a first group of playtesters, they said that they did not feel immersed in any way, and did not react to the environment in any way. Thus, I decided to create a way that would ease the player into entering the environment. As mentioned in a previous blog, a cave would be a good way for players to feel safe, because they would be in a refuge, looking at the prospect, as noted by Hildebrand (1999). The cave would be a small, dark place and the players would start at the dark end of it, traversing it towards the light, slowly revealing the rest of the environment. This should help the user not to be overstimulated from the multitude of objects on the screen at the beginning of the experience.

Fig.26 Environment with cave, bamboo vegetation and spline-based river – First Person View

Furthermore, the cave would serve a dual purpose, as it would eventually also serve as a transition space (GDC, 2019). The entrance to the cave would have vegetation (Fig. 28) in order to create a “stylistic dissolve”, thus helping the user become more easily immersed sensorially.

Some of the playtesters felt like the bamboo looked repetitive and that it “stuck out”. Since bamboo was not in the initial plan anyway, I decided that it would be a good idea to look into another asset pack with more convincing meshes that would allow for better immersion. Thus, I came across the Tropical Jungle Pack (PolyAsset3D, 2020), which was a much better solution to the brief of creating a rainforest environment, containing high-quality assets which served their purpose. Furthermore, it contained trees which were covered in other vegetation, suitable to use as the awe-inducing tree, due to the fact that abnormally large trees generally have vine pieces hanging from their branches, as seen in Fig.5, which can be seen in the Rainforest Moodboard (Fig.21).

In the figure below (Fig.27), the new environment can be seen.

Fig.27 In-game screenshot containing a new version of the environment, showing the new assets

While the assets in the pack were well-optimized, the quantity of foliage needed for creating a large enough scene that would look convincing and that would successfully elicit awe made it so that the scene would only be able to run seamlessly by a high-end computer with strong processing power and an expensive, high-end graphics card. This proved to be a problem, as most of the already low number of participants did not have high-end computers that would smoothly run the scene without significant frame rate drops, which would in turn severely affect their immersion. While this posed a problem, an alternative solution was found: pre-rendering a short, 30 second video run-through of the scene, where a player character would walk through the scene from the end of the cave to the exit, slowly looking around, in order to give the participants enough time to look around the scene. This would, on one hand, diminish the player’s agency and would make them walk at a predefined speed instead of allowing them to explore the area at their own pace, but on another hand drastically increase the number of possible participants, as now, from the necessity of owning a medium-to-high-end computer, they would only need to have access to a computer screen and a pair of headphones, regardless of their quality and price. 

After recreating the environment using the new asset pack with the same tools and methods, the results were noticeably more high-fidelity and offered an overall more realistic look to the scene, by having high-quality, wind-animated trees, grass and flora, as well as a new water asset which worked differently than the spline-generated river tool. This new water asset was a simple plane which was textured and animated so that, if placed next to a copy of the same plane, would tile seamlessly in all directions. 

After adding all of the assets to the scene, some more features that would aid sensorial immersion were added. In order to create a more believable world, with more depth and visual accuracy, I added a volumetric fog actor to the scene, which would add to recreating the usually humid climate of a rainforest. Combined with the setting called “light shafts” on the main source of light, this allowed for “God Rays” to be present in the scene, which allowed for better overall quality of the scene, and in turn created wonder, aiding in creating the awe effect, while also adding a divinity-related tone to the scene. 

A post-processing volume was added to the scene. This tool allows for the designer to add certain visual effects while inside said volume. In order to create even more wonder, I added lens flare to the volume, which created the effect seen below (Fig.28). A slight bloom effect was also added, which made the sun have a more diffuse  effect to its light, aiding in realism.

Fig.28 In-game screenshot showing Lens Flare and vegetation at cave entrance

After receiving feedback on the new environment, I noticed that most of the testers said that the colors were “flat”, and that a wider color palette would be preferred. Thus, I added the Amplify LUT Pack (Amplify Creations, 2016), which applies an effect that enriches the variation of colors on the screen, making them more vibrant than they really are. The difference can be seen in Fig.29, and it can be noticed that the colors resemble the Moodboard’s color palette seen in Fig.21.

Fig.29 In-game screenshot with and without LUT pack applied
Fig.21 Rainforest Moodboard 

The last thing that I needed to add to the environment in order to achieve better immersion is sound. According to Brown and Cairns (2004), “If gamers need to attend to sound, as well as sight, more effort is needed to be placed into the game. The more attention and effort invested, the more immersed a gamer can feel.” Thus, sounds have proved to not only be important, but an essential part of immersing players. Thus, I have added three main sound effects: an ambient sound for a jungle, containing insects making noises and leaves rustling (Hendmik, 2013), the sound of water running, so that players can visualise the water and expect it as soon as they come out of the cave (Archos, 2019), and finally, the sound of wind blowing sharply, just enough for players to feel like they are inside of a cave and coming out to fresh air (Karas_Homemade_SFX, 2015). A video run-through of the final artefact can be seen following the link below. Clicking on the name of the video after clicking the play button will lead to a YouTube page allowing for full-screen playback.

The scene has been composed following a few compositional rules which will be explained below. The cave’s exit doubles as a way to frame the environment in such a manner that the player would always be looking at it. The river, going in an almost straight line, runs from outside the screen towards the main focal point, the giant tree, which is surrounded by light, also being hit by light directly, thus the colour of its leaves is brighter compared to the rest of the trees and foliage. The smaller trees and vegetation were used as “negative space” (iPhotography, no date) in order to better frame the central focal point. The rule of thirds (SLR Lounge Official, 2018) was used as shown in Fig.30, where at the centre resides the tree, the main focal point of the scene. Fig.30 is also desaturated in order to show the contrast between the elements of the scene. This shows that most of the visual weight is brought towards the central and superior region, the sides being dark because of the shade that is being created by the cave’s walls.

Fig.30 Rule of Thirds applied to desaturated screenshot of the forest

My next blog post will discuss the results of the second questionnaire, which asks the participants to say how they felt towards the 30 second video run-through of the environment. Due to limitations, only written feedback has been gathered through the questionnaire and through emails.

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