Ilkley Moor Research Trip

So last week, I was not required to attend uni due to a Berlin trip taking place that many of the students and staff of the Design school attended, so we had a bit of an unofficial reading week, and we were encouraged to go on some trips to aid our research. (This also meant I wasn't able to do a Spontaneous Sunday this week as I was too busy, but it will return next week!).

As my new 3D environment project focuses on stone circles, I decided to take this as an opportunity to go and see one with my own eyes, and I set to work researching stone circles that I could visit. I soon discovered that a stone circle called the Twelve Apostles exists on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. This is not far from my girlfriend, Chloe's, hometown, which was handy because it meant we could go and visit her family during the free week and also go and see the stone circle. It all worked out very well!

I printed out a route and some maps that we could follow to reach the Twelve Apostles stone circle ,and Chloe and I got the train to Yorkshire on Wednesday. We went on our trip to Ilkley on Saturday.

Here's some info about the Twelve Apostles stone circle:

"The Twelve Apostles is a stone circle near Ilkley and Burley in Wharfedale in West Yorkshire, England. The Twelve Apostles consists of the remains of a stone circle with a diameter of about 15 metres. The circle originally had between 16 and 20 stones, but it is now reduced to 12 stones. The stones are made from the local millstone grit. All of the stones were fallen by the mid-20th-century and were lying loose upon the ground. At the centre of the circle was a small mound, which may have been the disturbed remains of a burial cairn.

In 1971 a group of amateurs made an unauthorised attempt to re-erect the fallen stones, but the stones soon fell again. The stones have since been re-erected.It is not clear who re-erected them, nor when. The site suffers severe visitor erosion, as it was formerly hidden beneath heather, but is now in an area of bare trampled soil. It is regarded as one of the most damaged prehistoric sites in West Yorkshire."

- Wikipedia entry on the Twelve Apostles

Before getting the train to Ilkley.

We approached the Moor from the North, from the centre of Ilkley where the train station is located. Our walk would take us up the northern approach, past the White Wells cafe located on the ascent, and up some stone steps before reaching the top of the ascent and the Moor proper. We would then walk south across the Moor to the stone circle. We saw lots of interest stuff along the way including Victorian graffiti carved into rocks, cairns, streams, and some nice views of the Yorkshire countryside and towns such as Ilkley and Bradford.

White Wells cafe on the ascent to the Moor.

Victorian Graffiti

After about two hours of walking, we arrived at the stone circle itself. It lies about 380 metres above sea level, and its location offered amazing views. We had been able to see very far for pretty much all of the walk, but the views from the circle itself seemed to be the most impressive of them all. The location also felt like the spot that was most exposed to the elements. It was very windy and it began to hail soon after we arrived at the stones.

Twelve Apostles is not the most impressive stone circle that one can visit, and it has been heavily affected by human activity and interference, but it was still very cool to see a real example of what I had been researching for the past two weeks. I took a moment to take in the sights and try and place myself in the viewpoint of the ancient people who will had placed the stones there. This experience will hopefully help me to pinpoint the feeling that I want to evoke from the atmosphere of my 3D environment.

Making our way back down to Ilkley...

Our trip to Ilkley Moor to see the Twelve Apostles stone circles was a really fun and insightful experience. I think that seeing a stone circle in person, and the pictures that I took, will help me with my environment art project.

There's a load more pictures of our trip over on Imgur, check them out by clicking here!

Learning UE4 Sequencer - Milecastle Video

This week, I have used the Sequencer feature in UE4 to create a camera fly-through video of my Roman Milecastle environment. The Sequencer is a tool that replaces the now-obsolete Matinee feature from earlier versions of the engine, and allows you to set up camera sweeps, events, movements etc. within an environment. I decided to give it a go after sitting in on a Sequencer tutorial that the undergrad students were having.

The video is just under 3 minutes long and has camera sweeps of the interior and exterior of the environment from a variety of angles. I also used Sequencer to make the doors open as the camera approached them in the video. It was a bit of a tricky feature to get the hang of initially, but now I have a decent grasp of it and I've started to think of other ways that I could use it in the future.

I also created a short piece of music for the video, which is something I wanted to do for the original submission, but didn't have time. I researched Ancient Roman music and instruments, and also took inspiration from game soundtracks such as Age of Empires II when creating the music.

Roman Milecastle / Design Practice 1 Submission Post

Design Practice 1 - Submission Post / Reflective Diary

Welcome to the submission blog post my MA Games Design, Design Practice 1 project.

I set out on this project with the aim of creating an effective, high quality and atmospheric game environment, as well as learning the methods of creating atmospheric environments along the way. My goal was to put what I have learned about atmospheric game environments into practice, while also continually learning as I went and refining and expanding my skills, both creative and technical, as an environment artist.

I have created a 3D environment depicting a Roman milecastle on Hadrian's wall, set during the late 2nd century AD in Northern England, in the winter. My reasons for choosing this setting of location and time is that I believe it has good atmospheric and immersive potential and is an interesting setting that can engage the viewer. It is set in a turbulent time in history, soon after the construction of Hadrian's wall. The symbolic nature of the milecastle as a frontier between civilization and Barbarianism is intended to give the scene and underlying sense of loneliness and danger. The winter setting also emphasises this. The conditions in the environment are intended to be difficult, which would make the player feel unease. However, I also tried to capture some of the beauty of the setting in my scene through the use of the terrain and foliage.

I tried to challenge myself with this scene by creating a large outdoor environment with quite complex, large architecture. I used many methods and tools that I had not used previously, such as UE4's instanced foliage tool and particle system. Of course, I also focused heavily on researching atmosphere in games by reading books, watching reference videos and playing games. This has probably been the most ambitious environment project I've done in such a short time, I've pushed myself to the limit and learned a lot and it has been a valuable learning experience.

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The project began in late November, after a while of trying to think of what environment to do (other early ideas included a Roman shrine/temple and a medieval castle courtyard) I found out about milecastles, researched them, and decided that was the way to go. I based the decision on the scale of the environment, it's atmospheric potential and whether I could incorporate my interest in history into it (I find that making historical scenes keeps me enthused and motivated). The software that I used was Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop and Unreal Engine 4.

I made a blog post at this early stage showing some quick concept sketches, click here to read.

I also made a Pinterest board that can be found here.

Shortly after, I began modelling, starting with very basic blockouts to establish the layout and scale. Here's a picture of the scene at this very early stage.

Very early blockout of the structure layout.

After this point, I actually didn't really make any major progress on the scene as I was advised by tutors to focus on the Literature and Contextual review for the other module, and the scene was largely untouched until the end of December.

At the end of December/1st of January, I created the final models of the architecture. I made a blog post about it which can be found here.

Early modelling stage.

Having focused on the other modules work until January 1st, I really had my work cut out for me in the week of the 2nd to the 9th. I had to get the scene from how it looks in the picture above, to finished. This was going to require more work and effort than any project I had ever carried out.

By the end of the 2nd January, the scene looked like this. Read that days blog post here.

Beginning to apply base colour textures.

On the 3rd/4th of January, I made tileable textures for the terrain, worked on collisions and began to model foliage pieces. Blog post here.

Pictures taken around this time:

My original grass texture.

The final barracks building with a basic texture.

And one shortly after, when I had painted the terrains in.

On January 5th I imported the foliage and rocks and decided to make it a snowy scene for added atmosphere! I made a blog post about it and it was to be my last post on the project until this one, as it was at this point that I kicked into high gear and became too busy to even make posts.

Added trees, rocks and made the scene snowy.

Over the next few days until this point, I textured all the pre-existing assets, modelled and textured all the detail items, did the lighting, textured the foliage and added post-processing effects and particle effects, amongst other things, and finished the scene. From the 1st-9th of January, I roughly calculate that I did about 70-80 hours of work...

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The Final Scene

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More pictures: http://imgur.com/a/RnXEb

So that's the final finished product and I must say, I'm really happy with hows its turned out. I've given this project absolutely everything I've got over the past few days and I hope that it shows. Now I'm going to write a bit about it!

So the goal of the whole project was to make an atmospheric, compelling environment. I've spent a lot of time in the past couple of months reading, researching and deeply considering what makes for an atmospheric game environment (or a film, play, or real life location). Do I believe that I have achieved that? In my opinion, I have, and here's my reasons:

•   The setting and era. The scene is located and set in a relatively early time in the Roman occupation of Britain. Hadrian's wall was completed in the mid-first century AD to create a clear border of the Empire which stretched from the Middle East and Africa, to and throughout Europe. The wall was in many ways the edge of civilization - surely the edge of civilization is an atmospheric place for a game?!
•   The terrain and snowy landscape. When it comes to creating atmosphere, weather is important, and snowy and wintery settings are a classic tool. They scream survival, hardship, darkness and uncertainty. I think that having the scene set in Winter works in tandem with the theme of being on the edge of the world to cement that feeling.
•   The scale of the environment. I took great care to make the environment look and feel like it could continue on endlessly in all directions, by creating the terrain in a way that did not obviously disappear in the distance. I made the wall long and with varied verticality so it could believably be occluded by distant hills. 
•   The story and historical accuracy of the setting. I have really come to enjoy basing my scenes in historical settings that I find interesting. I took many measures to add historical accuracy to the scene.
•   The lighting. The scene is set in the mid-morning on a fairly cloudy winters day, so the sun is in the North-East, often obscured by clouds, giving the scene a dim, blue tinted look that was achieved through lighting and post-processing effects. The torches and candles are warm and orange to contrast with the cold natural light.
•   Particle effects. Before this project I had very little experience with particle effects. I added fire to each of the torches, and smoke and steam to the cooking fire.
•   Models and textures. Each model was created to a fairly low-average polycount goal, to make for a more optimised scene that ran smoothly. The textures are all PBR with normal, specular and roughness maps, and metallic maps where needed. Texture sizes range from 1024 x 1024 for smaller props & detail items to 4096 x 4096 on the larger architectural assets.
•   Post processing effects. The post-processing effects that I used included tweaks to the bloom, ambient occlusion, depth of field and visual filters.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to include another aspect that I am passionate about: audio. I would have liked to have created a short loop of music and maybe some ambient audio to go along with the scene as I think that audio is half the battle when it comes to creating atmosphere. However, the scene itself must take priority of course! Maybe I'll come back to it in my own time and do some audio.

Historical Accuracy

 Here's a list of historical details that I included or considered when creating the scene:

•   The milecastle is manned by members of the Roman army's 20th Legion - or Legio XX, Valeria Victrix. This is one of the legions that was actually based in Britain and helped to build and man the wall. The Legion's boar emblem can be seen on the flag on the tower and the shield.
•   I modelled a gladius sword that was well-researched and is correct for the period and made of the correct materials.
•   The tower contains a map that is based on a reconstruction of an ancient Roman world map by 1st Century Roman geographer, Pomponius Mela.
•   The tower contains some period-correct coins bearing a picture of Emporer Hadrian.
•   The cooking fire pot contains "Polenta" - a staple of the Roman army's diet that was made of boiled grain. I colour-picked a photograph of the dish when texturing this part of the model.

And that concludes my submission blog post for my MA Games Design, Design Practice 1 project - my Roman Milecastle 3D environment. Thanks for reading!