For this final pass in VR, I had worked on several different things. Following up from the last post of Week 04, I had worked on some sculpted rocks that didn't make it into the project from the last week. I was able to afterwards work through the UV issues I had, which prevented me from cleaning up the rocks after decimating them and trying to bake them in Substance Painter to later texture. It turned out that when I used the UV Master in Zbrush, Maya and Substance Painter didn't like the UV system from Zbrush. I resolved this by going into Maya and manually remaking all of the UV's for the rocks. Once that was finished, I was then able to make my own rock material and have it implemented by our Tech Artist into the environment. While near the end it was a challenge, I thoroughly enjoyed sculpting the rocks and being able to explore more of Zbrush.
I also worked on a selection of audio for our environment. Based off the books and movies, Sauron can be heard speaking in Black Speech, which is the language of Mordor from which Sauron speaks to his servants called the Nazgûl. We wanted to be able to hear this when picking up the Ring. Jacob, our Tech Artist, had found the audio clip of Sauron speaking through the ring. I was able to go into Adobe Audition and tweak the audio with filters and effects. One of the struggles with the clip, was that there was music in the background. After some research, I found a way to be able to diminish most of the music in the background and some upfront. By using an effect called Center Channel Extractor, I was able to change the vocals to become deeper with more bass and reverb, while on the side channel levels get rid of the background audio. Along with several other effects, I was able to make Sauron's dark and guttural voice become and added a delay to blend/blur some of his speech. Making our player think they are starting to fall under the control of the One Ring.
