Dissertation Summary

The end to the dissertation has arrived and it's definitely been a journey, that of which I'm pleased to say that I've learnt a lot of new things on the way. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the whole production process was in fact the researching of the history of ancient Chinese architecture. I have always had a personal interest in ancient Chinese architecture, however I never had the opportunity in which I could use the research for a specific purpose.

In particular, I enjoyed the fact that the carpenters of the ancient Chinese world were able to construct massively complex structures using only a small range of simple assets, such as 'Dous' and 'Gongs' hence the name, the Dougong system. Furthermore, I also discovered that the system was so successful at withstanding the test of time due to the fact that the downward force of the higher tier frameworks are dissipated equally throughout out the whole construction system.

I liked the challenge of my project, however at the same time I felt as though I had over scoped the amount of time it would take to complete a working system of my own. Because it took so long to complete this system I therefore had to rush other processes such as texturing, unwrapping and testing. In addition to this, I failed to model the amount of objects that I had originally intended to create. From this, I also was unable to create a set of Normal maps for the objects I initially planned this mainly being the roof tiling texture.

While I struggled to complete my model within my self set time period, I however managed to achieve a primary goal that I had set during my proposal of completing my whole kit within 45,000 polygons. After the completion of the modelling process my total polygon count was 25,043. Although I am pleased with the fact that my polygon count was lower than anticipated, I feel as though it would have been better to make use of the full amount of proposed polygons. On the other hand, if this was the case, I believe that I would have been less efficient at completing other goals and therefore completed overall even less tasks.

At the end of the whole process of my dissertation I found that the gathering of the final assets within UDK produced a large set of unforeseen issues. For one, my mesh instances did not work correctly on all of the assets due to the fact that UDK does not support more than one base material per item. Although 3dsMax did produce the result I first desired for my final outcome, My main goal was to produce the assets and place them within UDK. Another error during this process was that the objects origin point was not centered and I completely ran out of time so I was unable to fix this.

On completing my research, I was able to answer my overall question around my dissertation, which was to see if complex structures could be made and constructed from modular assets for use in a game engine. I would respond with that they can indeed be produced using this method however it requires a lot of measuring and preparation beforehand to produce assets with such precise and accurate parameters.