I started with the idea of creating a film noir style scene where everything is lit by very hard lights and there is a lot of places with shadows. Although it was difficult to understand at first, I moved smoothly through the basics by the end of this assignment.

Things I tried:

1. I wanted to try in this scene was to have different types of textures on the terrain and have it look realistic. The reason this was a goal was because every time that you spray a texture on the terrain it doesn't look realistic because it is very messy. The way that I achieve this was by using a prefab object that was the concrete on the ground. After picking it out I copy pasted it and moved it around so that it fills the space. I did the same with the ledge of the parking lot and the fences.
2. Copied and pasted the fences next to each other and had them overlap so they all looked like one solid piece.
3. Made the building blend in more into the scene by having some of the actual terrain on top of it.
4. Transformed the first person camera so that it wasn't small compared to the buildings and objects.
5. I had two point lights on the lamp posts so that it would have the hard light noir effect I was going for and so that it actually showed up well on the ground.
6. Point lights in places where there aren't source lights just to highlight them.
7. I tried originally just using a different texture for part of the terrain to make it asphalt but that didn't work.
8. I also tried to enclose the player with a natural thing such as a fence but unfortunately the holes are still big enough or the player to escape.
9. I tried putting a tower with a light far off in the distance in order to make the surrounding area more realistic. I wasn't able to find a light strong enough to make the shine be visible to where the player is.
10. Decreased the intensity of the directional light so that there was a lot of contrast in the lighting.

The major problems:

1. I wasn't able to move the body of the character models so that the look natural and don't have their arms out extended in a weird way.
2. The buildings that I imported aren't solid so every time that I step in them I partially fall through the ground.
3. I had a lot of trouble with the fences. I originally wanted it to be a chain link fence but none of the textures that I found were transparent in between the chains. I ended up making them solid. In the future I would like to learn how to have the textures have parts which are transparent.
4. Transferring over textures from cgtrader.com because they were huge and their textures didn't seem to work.

Thought Exercise

I think that this scene in specific would be a nice place to build up tension in a film noir story. If you were sent to meet somebody from a previous scene and you just hear the character models whisper things around you and that give you hints about what is going to happen once you reach the last room inside of the building. The lighting works for that because the player is always wondering what is lingering in the shadows, and the things that the character models say would increase the anxiousness of getting to the last room.

Not only that but in this type of scene I think that it would be cool to see that things get crazier and crazier the deeper you go into the building. Like for example if you add an underground section to the building then it could also become a maze of just craziness.

The other direction in which this story could go in would be that the men in the scene send you into the desert to find different things and there are hints around the map that suggest that a certain object is at the radio tower. There could maybe be platforming challenges where you would have to jump across a broken bridge to get to a certain area of the map in which you have to get an object from.