Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Game Level Development Assignment Part 5 Post-Mortem and Distribution of work


What went right and what went wrong during the production:


Well one thing that went both right and wrong was the Maya to Zbrush to Maya to bake out normals and light map workflow, what went wrong was a number of small things such as creating seams in the models from not having softened the edges on the low poly model, setting the envelopes too large so that they overlapped with other geometry, forgetting to add lights for the light map, and other minor issues. After having mostly sorted out these problems out it changed to a right as it both increased speed, and the quality of the models. In one way it was advantage to do a number of assets in the debris set first off as it allowed me to become more familiar with this workflow before tackling the more major assets, something that I will look to be doing going forward as there is still a number of things that I find are not turning out quite as expected. Something that this process highlighted however was that I need to spend some time working on my geometry as this was probably what I spent the most time correcting to get a good bake.


The final problem we ran into with the project was that after lightmapping we lost the normal maps, we rolled back to the pre-bake files and with the use of screenshot script was about to render out the fly-through camera with dynamic lighting, we are currently in progress trying to bake out the lightmap with directed lighting for the executable build.


As for what went right, I feel that the team worked well together, communication and collaboration seemed to happen quite smoothly. Brad I feel was a good choice of Project lead, as he really seemed to have a vision for this level and a passion to bring it about. He was able to produce the greybox for the level quickly and produced a staggering amount of assets for it.


Distribution of Work between Team Members.


The bulk of the work fell to Brad on this project, with Me and Michael working primarily on assets for the scene. I feel this is partly as he shares a fault I have of not delegating enough in the lead role, as it often feels easier to just do it yourself as you now exactly what you want, and may not have words to properly communicate that to a team member. Tasks within the Unity engine should have probably be shared so that the workload was more even, and other members got more experience within engine.

This was not a huge problem with this project however as Brad was comfortable with the workload he had, however this may not be the case with a different lead.

I think in future projects I will be pushing to a discussion of key strengths and weaknesses of each member so that tasks are assigned with more forethought to play to both strengths and bolster weaknesses so that we get the most from the exercise.

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