A day late, but with much more content!
First, I decided my new project will be an abandoned school. This way I can mess around with tile flooring/walls, decaying areas, foliage, etc. Lots of fun stuff I either love to play with or stuff I have been meaning to get my hands on more (foliage). The image posted above shows off what I am currently playing around with in engine lighting wise. Because UE4 uses an eye adaption setting by default I’ve had some issue getting my lighting to be consistent between sessions in UE4.

This is the lighting in the scene without eye adaption.

And here it is with eye adaption.
Also the original image of this post is what the scene looked like when I opened UE4. The reason I think this is happening is because when I opened UE4 this session my camera was already inside the room. If I had flown out of the room with my camera and come back it would have probably ended up like the lighter image above. I am going to have to keep this in mind as I move forward because it is the best way to get lighting accuracy in dark areas. Our eyes adapt to the environment so having a room that you can barely see in makes little sense when there is more than enough light pouring in for our eyes to make things out with.
The current blockout is a bit further than this but is sitting in maya at the moment. I’ll post a screen shot of that later in this post. But for now I want to go over random discoveries this week in terms of other blogs/sources.
1. This week GDC updated the vault with all of the 2015 talk stuff. This means new free talks as well. I am still going over these, but my favorite so far was Ultimate Trim which went over some cool tools and methods for creating modular assets. I really like how they did the paint brush effect with vertex colors.
2. One of my favorite things this week was the release of the Substance Maya Toolset. Being able to bake everything inside of maya speeds up my work potentially a ton. I no longer have to swap between the programs to problem solve weird baking issues caused by mesh errors. I can handle all of my baking problems before switching programs.
3. Something else to note from this week. As I mentioned last week I have been spending some time recreating the character controller of my old game prototype LITTLEbit. One of the biggest helps with this has been the Math for Game Developers by Jorge Rodriguez on Youtube. One of my biggest issues back in the original controller was being limited by collision detection. My character could only go so fast. With the help of this series brushing up my vector math knowledge I was able to recreate the detection scripting and have so far been unable to break through walls with my character even if I am going 100 times faster than I ever intend it to go.
4. Another good resource I found this weeks is A Practical Guide on Normal Mapping for Games. I was hoping it would have a bit more in depth info on unsynced workflows but there is a ton of info in here that I wish I knew while starting out. I hope I am not breaking his request of not posing the guide without his permission by just posting to his polycount thread. If I am sorry.

As for that blockout, here I am. Going to play around wit the layout and small prop placement all weekend it seems. At the same time I will be listing off what I need to model/texture/etc. Hoping to have the floors and the walls started texturing by Monday.