Proof of Concept

The proof of concept is a great opportunity to figure out hoe to work the lighting I make in Maya into Unreal- how does that even work?

When making the proof of concept I had many problems concerning Unreal Engine since it was my first time using it. Many error messages came up about having to rebuild the lighting and even doing that didn’t solve the problem. Apparently, the UV’s were overlapping. I believe this problem is caused since in Maya I extruded the rope along a curve with the extruded faces too close together, causing the UV’s to overlap.

As you can see after I went back to try and make sure there were no overlapping models there were still error messages labelling models as either having “degenerate tangent bases” or “some nearly zero bi-normals.” I have gone back and edited the necessary UV’s and some of the error messages have gone. Not only this but now when I press “Play” the character model and camera acts strange. It automatically goes into first-person instead of the selected third and the character will not move at all. All I can do is move around the camera. I have tested if this is only the software, and if I open a new scene then the character moves fine. I noticed that the camera/character get messed up as soon as I import the scene from Maya. Maybe if I simplify the scene’s objects I won’t have any problems, if I model the absolute basic shapes since I only created these models as rough impressions of the finals. Therefore, since I may have not inputted as much care as I would to the final models, I may have left out important steps or made simple mistakes.

When trying to fix these problems, there were certain forums that resolved this issue, however these solutions did not work for me.

Check list in Maya- prep mesh for Unreal

• No Uv’s are overlapping
• Centre pivot all models
• Delete by type history all models
• Freeze transformation all models
• Group all mesh that I will export into one and then export.
• In Unreal import settings select ‘normal and tangents’. This is supposed to stop error messages coming up. Just to be safe I will do it, however, it hasn’t changed anything for me yet.
• The models in Maya must be exported as FBX so that materials are exported also.
• Once I have combined anything in Maya, delete history immediately (this may have caused a lot of problems in Unreal).

There seemed to be problems with my mesh so I restarted from scratch on the proof of concept. When I imported this new mesh into Unreal, the camera and character acted normally until I moved the character and camera onto the scene. When the environment is scaled up to size NEXT TO these then there is no problem. I will try to remove a couple of the walls to see if this makes a difference. The step after that is to remove the floor. My teacher recommended placing the models into Unreal separately, this may also work. Either way, I feel I am finally close to overcoming all of these problems and close to starting to record the video!

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Finally solved these problems and began making the video and now the rendered video camera doesn’t follow the same movements as in play mode. The camera follows the character fine, but not the movements of the mouse, so I can’t show the character looking around throughout the video.

Proof of Concept and tests:

I have tested/checked what the camera does in irst person and the recording and play mode perspective are the same. So, this is an option for the final video. I just have to get rid of the gun that is automatically equiped.