Cleaning/Optimisation, Decorating and new lighting in Unreal

 Today I added some decorations and new meshes to my scene. I modelled some cacti, a small graveyard, added another building and cleaned up the terrain a lot. I chose to add these mostly to add a sense of fullness to the scene, it felt slightly baron before but now it feels more lived in. I added some empty beer bottles as well to enhance the sense that this place had been lived in. 

My largest undertaking was cleaning up my meshes, before the clean-up my scene was very unoptimized and was sitting at about 6 million tris, even though it's a low poly scene, so I wanted to clean that up not only so it would run better both in editor and in unreal but also to make the exporting and importing process much less laborious. I was able to use quill to optimize my meshes by layer, so I optimized each mesh to a point where it lost little quality but increased performance. This was easy for the boxy shapes but much more difficult to rounded shapes. Some of those more rounded shapes came out slightly jagged and sharp but I feel it's a worthy trade off and it doesn't take away too much given my scenes style.

I also chose to switch from unity to unreal, mainly because I was able to find a good resource/tutorial for importing Quill FBX files into unreal, which was a very difficult process in unity. And also, because I think I can make the scene look much better using Unreal's lighting tools rather than Unity's. This was pretty simple; I just remade my quill FBX after optimizing it and instead of bringing it into blender or unity brought it straight into Unreal because that's the quickest way. This just meant that I had to create a material to relink the colours/textures made in quill, bringing them into unreal. This method ended up taking a fraction of the time that bringing my FBX into unity did and I wish I had done this from the start because then I would have had more time to flesh out the scene. Rather than spending most of my time fixing issues with importing into unity.

Because the scene is simple, I exported it all as one object. This meant that i could assemble the scene in Quill and a little bit in blender, then just import everything into Unreal. This made it easier overall to create my scene but at the moment the FBX in Unreal is at a totally different scale to the player character. So that's something to fix, which should be easy.

Importing and handling the mesh in Unreal was a breeze because of my optimization. Last time I tried importing the unoptimized FBX in Unreal it took nearly 15 minutes to load and slowed the scene. But now it's very quick to work with. 

I still need to add some post processing and some more dynamic lighting, right now the scene is just using default lighting. I thought I was going to have to remodel most of my scene but figuring out how to optimize and import the FBX into unreal has saved me a lot of work.