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Just another myblog.arts site
Month: June 2023
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Personal Project – Final & Showreel
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Personal Project – Editing
After completing the scene in Unreal Engine, I divided the cameras into three shots and exported them to After Effect for editing. In UE, I set up such as camera movement and depth of field to make the picture more cinematic. I used 2.43: 1 for the part of the picture size. To present a more cinematic effect, I use different focal lengths of the lens according to the distance lens, medium shot and close shot so that the audience can see the whole picture more clearly while including the details of the scene.
In AE, I mainly do editing and colour correction. The scene made in UE looks flat. I wanted the picture to look more layered, so I used the Curve tool to adjust the contrast between the front and back. In real scenes, there is often fog in the distance of the ground, so I blurred the horizon of the mountain and sky to make it more realistic. Then I also adjusted the overall tone because I wanted to present the cold feeling of the project. I chose a blue tone to make the environment bluer and more consistent overall.
For the music part, I used symphony-like sound effects, paired with the quilt and the spectacular snow scene, to make the audience feel more involved. In addition to this personal project, I am considering adding this scene to my graduation production.
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Personal Project – Scenes set up II
Next, I began to think about how to combine assets with the existing terrain. The points to be considered included the objects’ composition, size, and rationality. I used the rock of Quixel Bridge, the iceberg model downloaded from the Internet. What I want to do is in the polar ice field, so the frozen glaciers are formed by the mountains in the distant view, and the real scene, there are often huge rocks around the snow mountains.
Because the rocks are not covered with snow, to blend into the scene, I use the nodes in the blueprint to cover the stones with snow material. This is the most difficult part of the production process because of the nodes. The concept is relatively complicated, and I need to understand the concept and try many times to achieve the best effect I want. Then I use Foliage to generate freshly made stones on the terrain.
The pictures below is the final scene I made, with more details than the previous version
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Personal Project – Scenes set up
The first part of this project is scene set-up. In the initial stage, I found some materials and assets that might be used in Quixel Bridge. It contains many materials, including snow, snow-covered rocks, and snow with footprints. The assets are also quite rich, including snow-covered rock walls and icebergs.
Then I mixed different materials into a Blend Material to draw different textures on the terrain. This is a very practical tool for Unreal Engine. In a Blend Material, different materials can be drawn through different channels.
In the process, I watched many tutorials. In addition to using Unreal Engine more familiarly, I referred to other people’s works to arrange the existing assets into a more cinematic scene.
In the first stage I painted the base material which consisted of the frozen lake, rocks covered with snow, and the the snow.
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Personal Project – Planning
Since I mostly did architectural and interior scenes in the past, I decided to build a natural environment this time. I have always liked cinematic scenes like Blade Runner 2049, which can greatly impact the audience visually. This time I plan to make a snow scene because I have found a lot of example works, and the snow field is a type that I have not tried. I like the snow mountain map in the Battlefield 5 game because it can make me very fascinated when playing. I use Unreal Engine because it is a powerful and versatile game development engine that can be used for creating realistic and immersive environments, among many other things. In addition to realistic assets, it also renders real-time, so you can directly see the effect of the current production, and the rendering speed is faster than other rendering engines.
I hope to use Unreal Engine to create a realistic environment for this personal project. Since college, I have been studying 3D for more than 5 years. I have actually made it from modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering and other processes. Then I discovered that the part I’m most interested in is texturing and lighting, especially making natural landscapes or interior scenes.
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Steampunk Project – Window
The final asset is one of the most challenging assets in the steampunk scene. Since space and spaceships can be seen directly through the windows in the video, the shape and reflection of the glass need to be considered during the design process. The window is positioned close, so details must also be made. This is the most challenging of the three assets. I found many reference pictures when designing this window. I mainly wanted to use the Gothic window frame but with an industrial feel; here are the references I found.
While designing windows in Maya, I tried many different shapes of window frames and finally decided to use the following model. The central concept comes from a bee. The part extending out from the side looks like the wings of a bee, and the middle part is the head.
Overall, it looks like a bee flying from the front. One of the challenging parts is that the shape of the window is curved, so I used Maya’s bend to bend the built window frame to fit the curvature of the surface.
I am adding roughness and scratches on the glass, like the floor, for the material part. Because the camera is closer, I exported 4K textures. The underlying material uses copper as the base, adding raw embroidery and paint peeling Effect.
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Steampunk Project – Floor
The second asset is the floor in the scene I made. Because it contains a large area of glass, it takes time to consider reflection and other issues. Suppose excessive reflection will cause the objects on the lower floor to be invisible or let the light affect the interior. The colour tone is, therefore, a significant part of the main structure, including the wide metal frame from the outer frame and the transparent floor of the main body.
Although it seems simple, because of the large area in the scene, there are obvious defects that will directly affect other objects. I refer to the movie and the real scene as references. The following are the references I found.
In the process of modelling with Maya, I need to compare the size of the glass and the frame with the floor, and the size of the frame should not be too thick because the proportion of the surrounding objects must be referred to, and the model does not have too complicated parts.
I turned on the opacity channel in Substance 3D Painter for the texture part to display the transparent glass material. In the value of transparency, I use a lower value because the pool on the lower floor must be visible through the glass. In order to reduce the reflection, I increased the roughness of some areas, and there were some scratches similar to the actual glass surface. The frame part is the same rust material as mine, but the underlying metal is steel, which makes the whole look more layered.
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Steampunk Project – Pool
The first asset is a pool with a large area in the scene. In order to allow us to have more space for development, there is no specific specification for what type of pool it is. Therefore, after a meeting and discussion with the team members, I decided on the industrial pool as the direction because steampunk emphasizes the wasteland style, and its main features are corroded metal, large machinery and complicated pipelines. At the time, I thought it would be a bit boring to simply make a traditional swimming pool, so I started to find a lot of references. The following are a few examples of the concepts I found that met my requirements.
Then I started to enter the modelling process. First, I modelled the body of the pool because I think the shape of the pool is a very important factor. It will appear uncharacteristic if it is just a square, so I built an industrial pool.
I chose to use Maya for modelling. During the process, I modelled the pool body, handrails and iron plates in order, and then the machine in the centre. After the main things were done, I started to add details such as water pipes and wires.
Finally, after confirming that the model was completed, I used Substance 3d Painter to draw textures. I am quite familiar with this software before doing this project, so I pay more attention to the details of textures when using it. I used the material to present the texture of the pool being corroded by water and used the Edgewear generator to make the metal fade effect, making the model look more realistic and detailed. For the colour part, I used copper as the base material because it gives a brown tone, and then layered paint or stains on other layers.
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Steampunk Project – Planning
In the group project this semester, the lecture hopes that we will carry out a large-scale group project; the content is about the 3D scene of steampunk, mainly through the video of the LCC hall provided by Gonazlo to do Matchmove, and then import the 3D models we made into the scene among them, the compositor will present the scene to complete the final work.
In this project, I am a Look Dev Artist responsible for making the assets in the scene, including modelling and texturing. The objects I made include a pool, window and glass floor. The following is our list of the division of labour.
Even though we need to be responsible for our assets, in the preparatory stage, we need to provide the ideal reference of Steampunk in our mind to the group. The following are the references I found on Artstation and Pinterest.