Week 9: Optimization cleanup and presentation sequencer

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week nine: Mon 20th March to Sun 26th March 2023

Optimization is the process by which an asset or environment is optimized so that it runs smoother and more easily on the target platform.

This is ultimately done by reducing the number of draw calls a CPU issues to the GPU, which can be achieved by: keeping modular kits as small as possible, paying attention to texel density and polygonal density (example: the further away the asset will be from a player, the less dense the textures have to be, which reduces the number of draw calls that need to be made), and material optimization (such as ensuring that you pack textures, simplify materials, and utilizing the texture details panel when exporting).

Using the Unreal optimization tools, I went through each of them to assess how well-optimized my shop was. My Lightmap Density was mostly blue and green, and my Stationary Light Overlap showed no overlapping lights in my scene.

The Quad Overdraw map showed that the more complex and process heavy sections were in the windows themselves, but other than that the rest of the shop fared well (mostly blue, indicating that optimization was good overall).

The Light Complexity map showed that while some of my shop performed well (blue tones), there were large chunks of it that were performing less well, particularly around the areas where lamp lights and window lights intersected or fell upon more detailed areas of the mesh, especially the windows themselves.

The Shader Complexity map showed that the display windows and stained glass took the biggest toll on the shader, especially in areas where the glass in the display windows overlapped with each other. The fake glass in the ground floor windows, however, did not put any extra strain on the shader, which suggests that one way to optimize the shop could have been to utilize the fake glass technique in other sections of the shop that required a glass texture.

Using the week 10 video about setting up the sequencer in Unreal*, I managed to set up several shots of my Diagon Alley shop for the cinematic reel. However, I ran into a curious error in a few of my attempts where the camera would spin around itself as if on a pivot if I tried to pan around my shop more than 90 degrees at a time. With some assistance, I managed to fix this by going into the Look At Tracking settings in my camera details and turning the Look At feature to true and setting it to my stained glass window in the center of my shop, which forced the camera to focus on the window as it panned around.

REFERENCES

* Pryn, William. March 2023. ‘Week 10 – Create a video sequence in Unreal’. Microsoft Stream [online]. Available at: https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/9f9b94a7-96ba-4a52-b58d-28780e120d11 [accessed 9 May 2023]