Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 12

 In this sprint, I helped create a new introductory level that precedes the main experience. I created the sequencer, adding in the introductory video, as well as adding in the candy tin and fireflies that appear at the tail end. I adjusted the candy tin blueprint so that in the level, the player picks up the candy tin and the screen fades and then loads in the main experience. In order to get the effect looking good, I modified the dissolve material function so that the masking is created by the bounding box of the object and will always work properly from bottom to top.

Additionally, I updated the post-processing material again. The line weight varied, especially in areas of overlapping meshes like the grass, and so that coupled with better matching the Ghibli style we decided to have the toon lines only on the main characters. I switched the material from masking out the custom depth from the material to only applying the lines to the custom depth, and comparing the scene depth and custom depth to mask out the Niagara-based fire.

The post-processing result

The portion of the material changed.

Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 11

    During this sprint, I mainly tackled updating the model in the Seita rig and painting the skin weights. The rig is now finished and being used to update the animations.

I am now done with all of the specific tasks assigned to me, so I began polishing things in the engine. I tweaked the tiling of the water material so that it is less noticeable. I also began working on optimizations for the scene, such as reducing the particles in the fire to lower a shader complexity hotspot. I identified a tree model as being too complex, and reducing the number of leaf cards on it has been added to the task list.

The water tiling is less obvious now.

the fire effect looks largely the same, but the number of particles used was halved.

While the fire area is still more complex, it is now only red and no longer white. Reducing the leaf cards on the tree_03 model should help reduce the other hotspots in the scene.