Week #13: Final Week

This week was spent cleaning up and fixing any remaining problems I had with my bioluminescent cavern. Last week in class, when Todd opened up my scene, the meshes from the SoulCave that I used were missing, resulting in an empty scene with just the landscape. I reached out to Todd and he was able to figure out why it happened. Apparently the SoulCave assets were marked as unversioned which meant that it was automatically not pushed. When we looked at the size of the asset it was 1.5 GBs, which would be too much to push the night before the final class. However, because only a few meshes from the asset were used, we decided to migrate the scene to a sandbox project, delete the scene in the main class project, and then migrate it back from the sandbox project it the main class project. This is where I remembered that migrating between projects only transfers the assets used and none of the extras that come with the downloaded asset. Doing this dropped the size of the asset from 1.5GB to 150 MB.

One other update I made to the scene was to the landscape. Last week I ran out of time to make the landscape, so it wasn't using any Material. This week, after figuring out the issue of the missing meshes and remembering migrating, I looked into the StarterContent materials in the sandbox project and found one that worked well. I found the M_Rock_Sandstone material and it worked as a "sandy/rocky" ground for an underwater cavern. I migrated the Material and applied it to the landscape. This completed the look and feel of the bioluminescent cavern.

Potential locations for Alan's amazing swirling portal!

This week will be the last week for Virtual Production, and it has been a journey. I honestly did not expect to enjoy and learn as much as I did. I came in because I wanted to learn more Unreal to help with game design, but I'm leaving with a newfound appreciation for acting, filming, lighting, storytelling, and especially motion capture. I truly enjoyed this class and I'm really happy with the projects I've made for this class. I can't wait to see the final product of our class' crazy wild amazing story!

Thank you Todd for being and amazing teacher!