#8 - Polish & Additional Motion

It's done. Well, I'm calling it done. Done as far as this module is concerned at least. There's more work to do, assets to create, and assets that need a rework before I can call it truly finished.

I spent the last few days making some placeholder assets present well enough to submit. The bridge is perhaps the most obvious of these, and first in line for a proper rework when I get the time.

In addition, I also made some changes to the composition of the windmills in the background and added in some much-needed secondary motion. Now the windmill blades spin and the weathervane sways gently back and forth. The whole thing looks really nice in motion now.

The rotation of the windmill blades just uses a timer to add a constant rotation. 

The weather vane just uses a timeline to lerp a value from 0 to 10, and back to 0 again. This value is added to the vane's local yaw, causing it to swing back and forth.

My planning throughout the production half of this project looked as follows:

Some things of note here:

• From the start of production, I made estimates for how long each step would take, and what tasks I wanted to get done at each stage.
• In reality, the technical side of things took a lot longer than I anticipated. This is evident in how long the Landscape Auto-Material took, compared to other areas.
• Part of this came down to the time it took to improve my technical knowledge, but I also spent far too long making tiny tweaks and adjustments to it, when I should have just moved on.
• I really couldn't spend any more time on this by the finish, so the last week was spent making placeholders good enough to call "done".
• With better time management in general, I probably would have had time to make much better attempts at the rushed assets.
• The light green tasks are ones that I deemed to be only a "1st Pass", and will be the first thing reworked once I get the time after uni.

My Asset List currently looks like this:

• I think, overall, I got all the most important assets completed to a reasonable standard.
• On the building side of things:
• Everything bar particle effects, and extra decorative props got finished.
• A minor rework is needed on the roof moss (adding some clumps of moss + moss cards) to bulk it out.
• The post-box also had the potential to be a really nice portfolio piece by itself, but it's quite small in the scene, so it's lacking a lot of detail from the concept.
• On the landscape side:
• Just over half of the assets were completed, although a number of them need reworks.
• I wanted to sculpt the trees, so I may go back and do that.
• I didn't do any sculpting on the rocks, so they're very blobby-looking still.
• The bridge just has a basic tri-planar texture applied, it's very lazy. That's the first up for reworking.
• The windmills are very basic when viewed up close. The UVs aren't even set up right.
• I had a lot of feedback and suggestions for things to add, like flowers, cat-tails, background animals etc., that I just didn't have time to implement.
• I also had a number of ideas for VFX I'd have liked to add, like wind ribbons, rolling mist, and a painted cloud background.

Overall though, I'm pretty pleased with what I've achieved here, it's definitely nearly there. More importantly, though, I learned a ton, and there are a lot of techniques and bits of technical work I can pull from this to use in other projects.

It's been a really fun and interesting project to work on, and it's definitely a huge step in the right direction for where I want to take my style going forwards. It's also pretty nuts to look back at where it started, and where it's ended up: