Day: April 23, 2019

Gantt Chart Creation

Today I have mostly focused on the planning my time. For this purpose I’ve made a Gantt Chart including the entire project time. I have decided it into the two main sections with similar tabs inside them: THE RAINFOREST AREA, THE LAB FACILITY. This would improve the visual aspects of the chart and will make it more clear.

I know that I am able to produce around 100 assets in a month, so I’ve give each of the environment that amount of time for asset creation. I’ll use it more or less, but that’s what I believe would be a perfect timing.

As lots of my level would require technical work (objectives and collectables the most!), I’ve also planned some time for this development in my chart. It takes place at the end of the production, as I believe that would be the best time for it. In the worst scenario, the level can work as a static, not playable level, but it won’t work if there would be no finished assets. This is just the way I would work for this project, as prioritising seems to play a huge role in this production.

I have also make a place for bugs and error fixing. I gave myself entire two weeks for that. This stage also would include finishing anything that has to be finish before progressing to the final stage – post production (which I only gave a last week to work on).

Gantt Chart in Excel

I hope this time management would work perfectly, as this so far seems to be a reasonable time allocation. This should gave me enough time for each of the tasks with a small bracket for finishing of. I’m really happy with it at the end.

It’s raining man!

Today I’ve focused on conducting another experiment. While playing a game (Horizon Zero Dawn), I’ve came across the rain. It would add some more realism to the level and make it slightly stand out from the normal, sunny environments. As my project takes place in a rainforest (RAINforest), this is a pretty obvious choice for the weather. The plants always need more water than normal ones, so this would be a perfect condition for them to grow as big as I want them to.

I’ve made this experiment in the exactly same Unreal Engine 4 file as before (inventory). Any of those experiments didn’t get in a way with another, so it was completely fine. This experiment was supposed to give me an idea of how to make a realistic rain effect for the rainforest environment. I’ve fallowed a YouTube tutorial by Dean Ashford (link in the reference list).

The particle inside the UE4

The actual particle effect was made from two simple emitters. Setting up each of them didn’t took long, and I managed to get the effect right.

Although the rain was working, I was slightly disappointed by the final effect. The realistic rain wasn’t as realistic as expected and the splashes on the floor were only limited to one specific height location. This is a huge disadvantage when it comes to the realistic terrain. However, the entire experiment didn’t take long. I may repeat the experiment in the future and try out different technique to be able to maintain different heights of the terrain.

This also have another huge downside: the rain was running INSIDE THE BUILDING. this would have to be fixed in order to work in my own level. I may try to place my rain in the areas where there is no buildings or figure a way out to block the rain inside the buildings by adding additional hidden geometry (however, this may not work at all).

REFERENCE LIST:

Dean Ashford, (2017), UE4 – Tutorial – Simple Rain Particles, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmb2FrFunME (Accessed: 23 April 2019).