Room project - Reflection

Door

Arcade

TV

Room

This is a final reflection on my interactive media project, which involves creating an interactive room using original 3D models and event scripting. The 3D models were all created in Autodesk 3ds Max and the room was created and coded using Unreal Engine and its built-in blueprints feature. The room's main strength is the interactivity, there are three objects the player can use in the room. The most basic is the arcade machine, which simply toggles a light's visibility on/off when used. Initially this was meant to display an image, presumably of a game screen, but this was omitted due to time constraints. There may also have been legal complications unless I used my own artwork. The second interactive object is the door to the room, which the user will see first. The door toggles between opening and closing thanks to the use of a Flip-Flop function, which allows the door's movement to easily reverse when used a second time. The door's actual movement is created with the Matinee editor, which makes use of keyframes to easily move objects at the press of a button. The third, and most complex, object is the TV, which uses a visibility toggle like the arcade machine, except the visible object makes use of a media texture to play a video on the screen. The video is of my motion graphics project. If the TV is turned off, the video will keep playing, which is an oversight on my part, however it does reflect the actual functionality of a live TV. The on-screen text that appears near interactive objects ("Press E") was created using a simple text tool on a widget blueprint, which allows for creating player UI on screen. The text is coded, as seen above, to only appear when the player is near certain objects. Textures on the wallpaper and carpet make use of texture mapping to enhance the lighting effects and make it seem more realistic. The texture mapping was created using AwesomeBump, which generates mapping textures more easily than manually creating them in Photoshop, for example. Although the textures themselves work well with the room, there could have been more use for them other than just the walls and floor. The lighting in the room is pleasing, but I found it hard to control how much light actually filled the room, which is why the centre of the room is dimly lit, as there are only wall lights. The room is too large for the few assets actually made for the room. Too much time was spent getting the objects interactivity to work in the room that I ran out of time to create and add more objects to the room itself, although the few objects present are of sufficient quality considering my experience.