The Open Book–Diving into the Literary World

Thanks for coming back for this short read! This week, I am in Shanghai, the center of several popular game companies that thrive globally, like Hoyoverse, Epic Games, Blizzard, etc. With the abundance of in-game resources, I am starting to develop my game file, starting with the menu. As I mentioned in my syllabus, I referenced Unreal University’s tutorial on creating the main menu, but I will be adding to what I’ve learned from the video by developing a moving background, which as I established in my last post, will be a 3D animation that will display all three maps, separated by lightning. I’ve started modeling the 3D landscapes that I will be using for this animation, starting with the desert from The Alchemist. To achieve an uneven surface effect, I chose to use noise texturing, which displaces a surface using variables. 

However, I disliked how the surface was constantly uneven, so I decided to lower the roughness scale, which ended up with a more visually pleasing effect. 

When I saw the smoothed surface, I felt that this should be more suitable for a snowy landscape, which perfectly matches the description for The Giver’s “Elsewhere”. That’s why I eventually tried to represent The Alchemist’s desert with a different method, displacement mapping. Displacement mapping uses a grey-scale image to create a model that protrudes upwards according to the lighter parts of the image. 

Currently, I’m still working on making the dune shapes render correctly, instead of being pitch black. That is it for the progress that I’ve made for this week.