Justin Ho

I am very excited and happy with my final render. To be honest, I think this is the best work I have ever done. Looking back from the start with all the planning and modeling to the end render, it was an exciting and fun learning experience.  

Planning.

I am glad we started the planning process/phase during our second semester. This greatly shaves off tons of man-hours in terms of researching and finding references. Having a drawn-out layout helped me visualize what needs to be modeled and planned of time. Once the third semester started, I went straight into modeling and start with the whole workflow process from modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing to lighting, effects and rendering. Throughout the whole process I am constantly trying out new ways and experimenting with new workflow and best practices.  

Modeling.

Modeling for this FMP environment project is fun, but I will need to put some thought into it. As it is a large-scale environment set, I would need to go for the modular approach. I would need to put in some thoughts on what should be modular and how I go about modeling them so I can duplicate it and dress them up in Unreal Engine 5. All models need to be seamlessly stacked together and not have the idea of being heavily duplicated. Props are needed to “cover up” those flaws on those modular duplicated assets.  

UV Unwrap.

The new technique that I tried using for this project was the introduction of U-dim. I can squeeze in more texture maps into one material which makes the texture resolution better compared to just using a 4k map. It also makes the texturing work way easier as it's only one material. Textile density is also very important in this unwrapping phase as it will make the whole environment seamless in terms of texture and textile density.  

Unreal Engine 5.

After all my assets are done up to the quality, I deem fit, I imported them into the engine and start building up the scene. UE5 is not much different compared to UE4 so it is basically the same workflow in terms of applying texture to the material. What really makes UE5 different from UE4 is the introduction to Lumen. The lighting in UE5 is magical and fun to work with.  

Final Render.

Once all the render clips are done, I piece them together in after effect and make them into a demo reel to showcase my whole FMP environment project.  

Reference

Here are some of the videos I find interesting and how to best highlight my work.

Reading up on different camera angles and movements does make things a little more interesting.  

Dolly

Pan

Zooming

Just to name a few. The next post will be some of my rendered video I captured on UE5. The next step will be editing and making a demo reel out of the renders.  

References:

Youtube Video: Matthew Dismuke (2019), Environment Art Demo Reel 2019 [Online Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M20Ju7ww_4 [Accessed: 5th August 2022].

Youtube Video: Max Schellenberg  (2021), 3D Environment Artist - Demo Reel [Online Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLFljde6qoM [Accessed: 5th August 2022].

Youtube Video: Joseph Jacobs  (2020), 3D Environment Art Reel - Joseph Jacobs [Online Video]. Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KuMCUpHkgk [Accessed: 5th August 2022].

FMP: Test Render  

First on my list is to create a spark effect for my scene. Using UE5’s Niagara particle effect, I played around with the particle to get the desired effect that is needed for the scene. Once I got the desired effect, I added them around my Gundam.  

Next will be the yellow spinning siren lights. For this part of the effect, I just attach two spotlights to a mesh and use blueprint to give it the rotation.  

Placing the spinning lights was a little tricky as in real life, lights do not just appear out of nowhere. To make those lighting make sense, I attached it to the cage of the Gundam, so it gives it a sense of illusion that the lights are coming from there.  

Continuing from what I had previously, I am starting this lighting project from the ground up. With no lighting, I added the main key light to briefly light up my scene to get a sense of low ambient light.  

Added post processing to light up the bloom effect on those emissive material.

Volumatic fog lets those spotlights really shine through my main focal point which is the robot.  

As the main focal point is the maintenance bay of the robot, I wanted that area to be lit up more compared to the rest of the environment.  

The next step of the lighting process is to add spotlight to all the emissive materials assets to make those assets make sense as there needs to be some sort of lighting to it.  

Some textures need to be changed and edited because some of the metallic material is too reflective. By adding all the additional lighting, I can spot those metallic materials that need to be fixed.  

Once the first part of the hangar is done, I checked in with my tutor Wayne to get his stamp of approval. With the greenlight being lit, I plan to give my hangar additional depth by duplicating the lighting and hangar horizontally to extend the length of the hangar.

-Empty hangar-

-Robot in the maintenance cage-

-Robot getting its wing engine installed by the crane-

-Empty hangar-

The above will be the layout of the entire hangar. By duplicating the hangar, I will need to go back to the drawing board to change and add additional lighting to focus more on the highlights. Here are some of the renders taken.

This was being shown and reviewed in class by my fellow peers and with their feedback, I will need to tweak some of the lighting The part where the robot’s wing engine is being installed, the lighting is overly exposed, and some contrast needs to be added in.

Having the front potion of the lighting dimmer down so it will not draw too much attention to what is happening at the back, which is the main focal point.  

All these tweaks will be what I will be focusing on this week. Once the lighting is set in stone, I will be moving on to effects.  

Here are some of the previews on what I had in mind for effects.

-Mist card to be place across the scene

-Sparks  

-Yellow spinning siren lights

Once the effects are done, I will be setting up camera animation and plan for my render scene.  

While I was doing my lighting for my hangar, I took a short break by reading and watching tips and tricks on making my lighting and mood better for this project. While searching, I came across this article on lv.80 by Hussien Shalaan on setting up lighting for a Sci-Fi Space Environment in Unreal Engine 5. Since I am using UE5 for my project, this article really helps me a lot.  

Hussien Shalaan is a senior environment and lighting artist working in the industry for about eight years. On the first few paragraphs of this article, he shared about his life leading to this day as an artist and his initial workflow of getting assets on the right scaling. The main takeaway from this article is the lighting workflow. He said and I quote “From my point of view, lighting is one of the essential elements of the scene, if not the most essential. Because if I am working on a stunning level design and the lighting is terrible, everything will look awful.” (H. Shalaan 2022)  

Lighting can make or break any environment even if you have the most awesome looking model or textures. By not following a more traditional lighting workflow, he broke down his own unique workflow starting with,

Key Light  

Rim Light  

Assist or Fill light  

Atmospherics  

Post-Processing  

Final Touches

It is interesting for him to not use directional lighting as key lighting, but he used emissive Material and spotlights to achieve the desired look in replacing key light (directional light). By having a rim light, it will draw the scene, define it, highlight many areas of the environment, and give the scene a realistic and artistic look. This article has many video tutorials breaking down various lighting aspects of his workflow.

I will try to incorporate some of this technique and workflow into my lighting  and hopefully it will make my scene pop out even more.  

Final

References

I should have checked lv.80 before starting my project. This article I came across is providing free modular sci-fi assets that will help me with my current FMP project and it will shave off some time creating my modular assets. Nevertheless, I did learn a few techniques and tricks on creating modular assets and piece them together in my Unreal Engine scene. I will download this pack of assets to use in the future if I ever need them.  

Reference

While I was browsing through the various articles on helping myself improve on my final major project, I came across a remarkably interesting article/video displaying realistic grass and wind animation. The video itself dived deep into the theory and mathematics behind wind randomness and calculating a more realistic approach and implementing it into the nodes in Unreal engine. I admit I was lost in the video on now he explained the math behind it. What caught my attention is that mathematics theory is being implemented into the game engine. I personally have no programming knowledge and I know that at the back of my head, mathematics is always present in programming.   Nevertheless, this is an interesting video I came across.  

References: