James Swanick | Week 8 - Fights with Lights for Sights

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I tried (a little less fruitfully) to work out volumetric light cones for the enemies' vision cones. I tried a few things:

A translucent cone

 this was a little wishful thinking. It's a pretty convincing light cone in a toon shaded setting, but it wouldnt cast shadows or get clipped by objects positioned inside of the cone, so you would be able to see the full cone from the other side of a wall. 

A triangular portal card

  I was hoping to use the same strategy I used for the fake overhead lights two weeks ago, and angle a billboard shape representing the vision area toward the player's view. If I could capture the shape of objects in the way i could cut out the appropriate part of the shape. The geometry ended up being just a little too complicated. 

Particles emitting from the vision light, rendering the trails as beams of light
  This strategy came the closest to working, It's sort of an approximation of the way light actually works, including all the bouncing and occluding and intensifying when light paths are crossed. Sadly, it depended heavily on the collision of particles with the world, but particles moving at an appropriately high speed would frequently fail to collide with things in their path. Light beams ended up going through walls constantly anyway. 

Here's what that looked like:

I also helped with the mocap work, giving feedback to our actor and running the recordings at the mocap computer.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• meetings (2 hours)
• Attempts for volumetric lights (6 hours)
• mocap (5 hours)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• The mocap went well!

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• The volumetric light cones did not. :C

NEXT TASKS

• I'm still hoping to complete volumetric light vision cones next week. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 10 hours