Overview
PATCH is An upcoming FPS set in solarpunk Italy! In a world where humans and robots have learned to coexist, computer viruses have begun to affect reality, spreading corruption through the streets. You must step in as a first responder who is racing to contain outbreaks before your small Italian town collapses, while uncovering the mystery of what really started this corruption!
Skybox
WIP Over the Course of the games development for the skybox
While the clouds looked beautiful They deviated a bit to far from our art style. so we brought in an amazing illustrator Pia Evangelica to redraw and adapt the mood of the old clouds I had worked on before moving to Tech! Below are the Final iterations of the Skybox during studio 2!
I'll have more to Mention with material/tech work soon
-sun
-star twinkle
-Birds/boat trails
-tree placement system
-building placement system
-Modular cones
-sky trails
-sun
-star twinkle
-Birds/boat trails
-tree placement system
-building placement system
-Modular cones
-sky trails
Lighting
For the Lighting of Patch, I worked with our project lead Aiden to nail down the outdoor atmosphere and leveraged the skills I learned about baked lighting in overgrown. Unreal's GPU lightmass system requires a bit more overhead than the traditional baked lighting that was used in overgrown.
While the atmosphere was really easy to nail down with Aiden using lumen, Unreal does not let you seamlessly convert the scene. while getting lightmaps and uv's fixed was easy, The hard part came from some of our models breaking during the conversion from fbx to Uasset. The solution was to remove the edge harden export data as it seems to be bugged in unreal 5.6.
We also got help from one of our professors on HDR tone mapping! While I've learned a lot more about tone mapping since then thanks to THIS GDC TALK, the basic idea was that we could push a lot of our colors to be more vibrant through removing its effect and keeping high saturation.
While it is true that we did get more saturated colors, looking back I feel like we lost a bit of stylization with the bloom. because the tone mapper would take brighter values on emissive's and turn them white. Things like our streetlights would look more like the data in the pipes. If I was to go back and change one thing this would be it. I want to find a way to keep the saturation while allowing the bloom to stay the same.
Below is some of the final renders for screenshots that we got in each space!
(not added yet sorry)
While the atmosphere was really easy to nail down with Aiden using lumen, Unreal does not let you seamlessly convert the scene. while getting lightmaps and uv's fixed was easy, The hard part came from some of our models breaking during the conversion from fbx to Uasset. The solution was to remove the edge harden export data as it seems to be bugged in unreal 5.6.
We also got help from one of our professors on HDR tone mapping! While I've learned a lot more about tone mapping since then thanks to THIS GDC TALK, the basic idea was that we could push a lot of our colors to be more vibrant through removing its effect and keeping high saturation.
While it is true that we did get more saturated colors, looking back I feel like we lost a bit of stylization with the bloom. because the tone mapper would take brighter values on emissive's and turn them white. Things like our streetlights would look more like the data in the pipes. If I was to go back and change one thing this would be it. I want to find a way to keep the saturation while allowing the bloom to stay the same.
Below is some of the final renders for screenshots that we got in each space!
(not added yet sorry)
TECH
Weapon Animation Blueprinting
Our Weapon animation system was probably the most time consuming part of the project I worked on. Predating even the game file itself. Having Gunplay that felt fun to fight and shoot is absolutely pivotal to a good first person shooter experience, and even if the animators were not able to add all of the features I worked on, I'm still super proud off the tech that did make it in! Starting off with a project made while patch was still in conception (play blast goes here)
For this project I was doing exploratory research into what makes a modern gunplay animation system. I found 2 really great talks specifically about do's and don't in the animations and how to handle certain Technical issues such as separating the gun and player FOV, blend spaces, and first person animation blueprint flow.
Soon It was time to move onto the Rigging process for the animators. Michelle Kim was a huge help throughout the process... culminating in our final starting pose.
The initial Anim Graph Was shaped off of the lessons I learned from working on RESIDUAL CHRISTMAS With the most important actions taking priority while more nuanced actions are moved into blending spaces. I worked with Xander Franco on reordering some of the blueprinting while he created a super cool Input action system to remove excess Variables. While it was out of scope to have directional input affect the gun Like in the Studio one project. I still was able to work with player speed so players who use controller still feel how fast they are going.
Building making systems
COMING SOON!
