Wall Finished

Finally finished the wall, took so much longer than I thought it would. Retopology took forever and it was suprisingly hard to make it modular and tile seeing as it is an irregular shape. Although in heinsight if I did it again I would know the full pipeline so I could make some changes before hand. Getting it roughly set up in Unreal was easy though, so it was worth the effort. Lightmapping also became a problem with the mirrored geometry causing lighting seams.

I got around that by unwrapping all the edge stones as one solid uv shell in the lightmap which pretty much solved the problem although there was still a very very faint line there. However research informed me that this is a common problem in the industry so I didn't worry too much about it.

The last major problem was trying to get my asset to look as half as good as it did in Marmoset in UDK. I took a day out to learn about the material editor (further than the basics) and custom shaders. I'm not sure yet if i really need a custom shader because the default phong did a pretty good job however I was playing around with a half lambert shader similar to team fortress 2 which I preferred seeing as it was less gritty and high contrast. Phong turned all shadows to pure black which wasn't great. The only downside to the half lambert shader I came up with (don't think I had quite done it right) was that it reduced the normal map effect somewhat. However I was able to compensate for this somewhat by pumping the values during post processing which can be seen below. I feel that this shader was closer to marmoset which I like because that's what I'm viewing assets in as I make them.

To be quite honest I've been rather side tracked by shaders at the minute seeing as I have a better understanding of them now but I realise I should  probably worry about that when the level is complete because it's hard to get a sense of how everything else would look. So for now I've left everything as the default Phong and set up the materials without custom lighting.

I'll probably do a more in depth shader post nearer the end of the level.