Hadleigh Castle – Evaluation

With the Hadleigh Castle project concluded I can say that there were many things that I am unhappy with in our final result, the first of these being that our textures on everything   completely messed up and all came our stretched and just did not look good at all, If we were doing this project again I would definitely put a bigger focus on getting everything textured once they were modeled instead of leaving it so late which really messed us up in the end.

 

 

The castle itself’s shape and models though came out perfect in my opinion and all went exactly to how we planned and to scale. I am also very happy with the lighting in the castle with the torches flames being the primary sources since a lot of the castle was shadowed by the forest around it. We added a forest and perched the castle on the hill so that it doesn’t look as plain outside of the castle and I feel that this was reflected very well in the final video of the project in which we displayed our finished project.

Our models for the building, and interior decorations I feel were not as important and so I feel that we wasted a bit of time on making things no one would see rather than focusing on the main parts of our actual castle and so we had all this detail but the texturing just wasn’t there and it truly showed.

I am proud of my teams time management and how we all stuck to our roles though, we all assigned ourselfs tasks that we would complete and put together for our final project. The models in my opinion were the strongest part of our castle and hopefully is what made our group stand out most.

If we were to do this project again I would say to my team that we should texture as we go to save time and prevent the issues we found on the last day when trying to add textures to the models. Next time I would also start working on the lighting and the other small details around the castle earlier so that we had a finished “shell” of the castle with all of the features such as lighting and backgrounds but just needed the final models imported, which would have made us finish our project earlier which would have then given us atleast a week or two to iron out all imperfections and make our project the best that we could have.

All of this being said, I am really happy with our result still as for our first main project of this scale we handled it perfectly and worked as a team to the best of our ability, This for me was a very fun project to work on and a very unique one.

One of the most interesting parts of this project was visiting the castles ruins and planning mentally how we would reconstruct it in Unreal Engine.

 

How we used Audio, Visual and Interactive elements in this project

In this project we created a video with overlaying audio tracks of myself and Carl reading facts about the castle when the camera pans to the appropriate area, our original idea was to interact with signs dotted across our castle which would then queue a voice line corresponding to whichever sign it was that was pressed.

We did not have enough time to implement this feature though so we settled for the audio during our short video displaying the castle.

This would have helped tell people with no history on the castle understand why and when it was created and the purpose it served.

Hadleigh Castle Week 5

For week 5 I looked into the exterior of our castle, it was originally a plain block with a grass texture on it which was very plain and was ugly to look at so I decided to try and model a few trees and other external decor for the outside of the castle so that when it came to making our video the people will have something to look at.

Here is a first attempt at me modelling a tree in Maya:

It was very basic and was featured 2D leaves but I made the call to scrap this model as I thought it was too cartoonish for our castle and so opted for a larger cluster of trees which I could duplicate to create a whole forest. This not only saved time but looked nicer with our project and overall I feel worked out for the best.

This week I also textured all of the castle walls and buildings within the castle and gave all of the houses interiors so that it feels more lived in, this featured stoves, tables, glasses and plates and a fireplace. As well as actually creating the castle using our modular assets and the block out Jake Chamberlain created for us.

The models were created by the entire team and not just me alone.

Towards the end of this week I researched into how to make a video in Unreal so that I was prepared for the final week of our project.

Hadleigh Castle Project, Week 2.

In this week I looked at our levels lighting and used our prior research to determine popular torch ideas for the time. I finished by finding this image and decided to attempt to recreate it in maya for our level.

Once I made this torch I imported it into our level and used a particle fire effect as well as a orange tinted point light to give the illusion that the fire from the torch was lighting up the room that it was in. I am happy with the way it looked in Unreal and so we kept it for use in our project.

I also started this week, a trap door to be used on top of our ladder hatched which the controller would open when climbing up.

The hatch never had enough time to be implemented and so it was scrapped in the final weeks of the project.

Hadleigh Castle finishing touches and youtube video, Week 6.

For the final week in the hadleigh castle project I made all of the lighting and exterior of the castle which was just a hill surrounded by a thick forest to give our world more life. We had to create a short video and so I did this by using the cutscene tool in Unreal Engine 4 and just made a basic fly-by of our castle. Prior to this week our castle looked very simplistic as it was on a flat grass terrain but adding the exterior really gave our castle history and improved the look of it immensely.

Here is a link to the video I created which includes our commentary of the level which describes the breif history of the castle.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FAbmBqMOT6zmeBEqHfvjET4MGmPGVNfN

Task 2 – The Pitch

Here is a power point about our pitch for our project.

(Press Link)

hadleigh-castle-restoration

Models for Hadleigh Castle (Overall)

The 3D Models I created for the project

For this project I modeled a horse stable, wall torch, trap door and a tree.

First of the set being my stable.

To create this model I looked at housed from the time period and noticed the wood supports were on the exterior of the house, which gave the houses of that time a very unique appearance which I used as inspiration for my designs.

To create it I used squares and cylinders which I resized into all different shapes to make the walls, window bars and the roof.

The next was a wall torch.

This will be our main source of interior lighting, combined with UE4 particle effects to create a flame, as it was very common of the time to use wall torches as light, I did a quick google search to give me ideas which I interpreted myself and combine different textures to give me my final design which I feel came out well.

Then there was a very basic tree to give the outside of the castle life.

This was a very basic design using 2D textures to trick the viewer into thinking it was a 3D object, I used our wood texture and basic leaves to do all of the tree’s textures. It was very simple to make, using only cylinders which I altered to give a more realistic and weathered look.

Lastly, I made a trap door.

This is the most complicated as I have to implement a bone system to create open and closing animations, this will be used above every ladder to access different floors instead of leaving the level open. It will make the castle feel more realistic.

Making a ladder for our castle towers. Week 3 and 4

My Task

Over the next two weeks I tasked myself with making the ladders work in Unreal Engine 4 so that we can access  each individual floor of the towers. The project took around 40 minutes to complete and I believe came out very well.

Firstly I had to start with making an actor out of the ladder static mesh we had created in Maya:

As you can see the box collision is larger than the actual ladder so that when the player has climbed up the ladder they can access any ledge without any glitches, this is going to make the transition between floors much smoother.

The ladders work by pressing the E key which I had to program to make the character fly but only in the box collision to give the player controller the feeling that they are climbing the ladder. To do the code many changes had to be made to the base firstpersoncharacter blueprint in Unreal Engine 4.

These were the changes I made –

This included adding 2 variables to check if the player is on the ladder and if they were near it which allowed them to climb.

After this I made the ladder actor and added these commands –

These checked if the player was on the ladder and if they were it would make them fly up to the top of the box collision.

This concluded the creation of our ladders.

 

 

 

Task 1 – Hadleigh Castle week 1 – Research

The Brief

Our task for Project 4 has been to recreate Hadleigh Castle in Unreal Engine 4, by Hadleigh and Thundersley Community Archive. The task involved us getting into small groups of 4 with certain roles, including 3D modeler, Voice over artist, Programmer and 2D artist and a group leader. Together in our group we have assigned ourselves certain jobs on our Trello page and mark off what we have done so far.

The research we will be conducting involves going to the castle and using it for inspiration for our models and textures.

Research

The research we have conducted involved looking at castles from the same era and seeing reoccurring trends with castles built in that era to give us designs and ideas for our own castle design. One I looked at was Caernarvon Castle, a castle built in 1283, roughly the same time as Hadleigh Castle.

I found this castle interesting because it was from the same era and has the same structure as Hadleigh castle, being thick, sturdy walls with towers for lookout and defence. This castle inspired the designs of my 3D models that I completed as I used items from this time to determine what to texture floor hatches and wall torches with.

More research involved going to Hadleigh Castle and taking pictures of the walls and local area to be used for our own textures. We collected many of these and made them seamless so that we could use them in our project.

We have many of these textures readily available for use in our project now.

Here are a few examples of pictures we collected :

We have a mixture of walls and floors that we will use in the final design.

Ideas

We will be using wooden signs around the castle which when interacted with will play an audio cue which will say a fact about the area the player is in.

We will use ladders and ladder hatches for historical accuracy

All buildings should be enter-able, with lots of detail including tables, wine glasses etc. We will also have wall mounted swords and shields.

We will use particle effects for torches and campfires/fireplaces.

Player starts off at the front gate of castle so they can explore the entire project in order.

Concept art for all designs we have created on trello, here a few for the torch, hatch and towers/walls.

Resource Requirements

-Autodesk Maya

-Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator

-Unreal Engine 4

-A3 Sketch pads

-Access to castle, our own textures and photos we took.