3D Animati🎥n & Ga🎮es

DIVE Teaser Trailer Final University Submission

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Again the throne room was a different map from the previous 3 scenes.  I composed it with assets from sci fi packs, the aztec temple pack and assets modeled by our team. It was a very quick environment to compose and create.  When it comes to lighting, the main light was obviously blue, then I thought that since there are gold elements in the throne, I would reinforce this and add a yellow light to bring attention and focus to this part of the environment.  The biggest challenge was when I added the post processing and started playing with reflection and then the SSR created noise in the metal surfaces.  After doing research on the matter, https://evermotion.org/tutorials/show/10688/high-quality-reflections-in-unreal-engine-4, I have used planar reflections to hide the grain and bring back the good reflections while keeping the SSR, which gives more atmosphere to the scene.  SSR is usually used instead of ray traycing, since the latest is very heavy in and lowers the performance of a computer.   Screen Space Reflections (SSR), when enabled and set quality to 100, creates noise and decreases the quality of the reflections, making them blur and grainy. This is why the Planar Reflections were a good shout when I researched it. Because the main area where we can notice the SSR grain is in the metalic walls on both sides of the Throne, I have applied the Planar Reflections to both of these. Basically it is a plane that was set on top of the asset but it looks like there was nothing put on top of it which is awesome.  Asside from this reflection issue, there was nothing else that brought any concerns. And even this reflection matter was really great because i got to learn a huge deal out of it!

The map for this city was pretty straight forward. To start with I composed it with the destroyed buildings we made. Then I added some other assets made by our team such as the lamp, statues, the banners, the emissive flooring.  Following this I experimented with the height fog and later adjusted this one as I put the fire to simulate the fog spreading throughout the street. Afterwards I added cables and debree, decals and other assets that would mak the street look destroyed and abandoned.  Finally, I added the lamps and lights to the scene alternating between a red light in an alleyway and the white lights spread in the street.  Since its after war and an abandoned street I created a blueprint that makes lights flicker. You can see it in this video: https://youtu.be/jWM3_vmRxZs .

I got the same map of the previous city, duplicated it and startd deteorating the environment, changing the colour gradient to a darker varient and taking away the lights. The buildings, like one of the previous posts shows, had their textures changes to the destroyed variants.  I used decals fromt he bridge to add cracks, dirt and so on to the environment. As well as this other free packs from unreal were used to add pipes, rocks and the fire like we can see in the first image.  The geometry in the scene was moved, scaled, changed and twisted to convey the destruction of the environment. It was a fun process getting the city and sort of smashing it and breaking it. It came out quite an interesting environment and definitely it conveys darkness and destruction which is what I wanted. 

The Cel shader was made from scratch. I first made the 3 toon shader, which devides the colour into 3 different shades giving it a very cartoony look and then made the nodes for the black outline. Later I took the outline out and used the free one in the Unreal marketplace and combined it with the 3 toon shader I did. Even though the result was interesting, it was very difficult to work with and get the wanted results so we decided not to use it for now.  The depth field fog however, was kept, to give a depth that the exponential height fog alone could not bring. Both the blue and green fog combined brought better depth to the scene.  Later when the project was on its final stages I tried the Cel shader just out of curiosity and the recult was actually very astonishing!  With the help of university, we got a very cheap pack from the unreal market place of an Aztec Temple. I used some of its assets to build the throne room (see in next post). Because I wanted to add an emissive channel to one of the assets, I downloaded the albedo map, then took it to photoshop and painted the emissive map. Following this, I brought the map to UE4, assigned it to the material and tadaaa! Asset with an awesome emissive was now there! It was the second time using this process, after the japanese environment project and it is a very quick and effective process. From the Aztec modular temple, I used a few assets to help me shaping the environment around th throne room. These were very useful but obviously the focus of the scene was modeled by the team. Other free packs from the market place were used here and there to get some assets to shape the environment!

I used substance source to look over a few materials I could get and a couple caught my eye so I used them for these buildings. Some turned out much bettet than others but overall all buildings turned very interesting.  Besides being laborious there were no issues texturing these buildings. All of them had only 1 UV tile, so I had to use the polygon fill tool to select the exact shells to texture. 

The lighting was and still is very complicated in this environment. We went from having it too dark, cold blue to adding yellows coming from bellow to convey the livelyhood in the city and then taking most of these yellows off as it would take away the focus of the pyramids in the foreground too much. The foreground was composited more carefully than the background. A series of buildings were modeled and textured for the background.  Now that the project has been extended to the 17th of May, we might go back and polish this city scene for the final trailer.  Even though the use of cel shader in the post process was taken away, the depht of field fogs created (blue and green) were still used in combination with the exponential height fog to give more depth and add a mysterious atmosphere to the scene.

The character with its rig and animation was taken to Maya where I imported the Throne done by Antonio in order to scale both and get the character’s exact pose. I got the hands holding the side of the throne and the character looking magestic. UVs and Textures were exaclty the same. I changed a few elements like the armor pieces, that in Mixamo got deformed, for the original ones in the first character and adjusted the clothes. Then assigned the attributes to get the same UVs and so the textures came out perfect.  In the last image you can see the character in the engine, in the first shot. 

As well as this, I have done a quick research on the normal maps of UE4, becaus the normals looked strange in the engine...and found out that we should have been using a UE4 template all along when texturing our models. One reason why is because the SP default template uses the OpenGL normal map format, whereas UE4 used the DirectX format. At first it doesnt look like it makes much of a difference. However, after doing a research and watching tutorials, I’ve seen that bringing normal maps in OpenGL format to UE4 would invert the green map, changing the depth of the normal map. Of course this could be changed inside the engine, which I did with the assets we already had.  Now, whenever I want to make a model to go to UE4, I use the correct template though.

Since we are mixing Maya culture with Sci-fi, I’ve decided to create a few alphas that would mix both and that could be used for texturing the various upcoming assets. 

At this point creating the environment, I have experimented with a few more colours for the lights. I have added an HDRI to the post processing that allowed more light to come in the scene. Then I changed the tint from default to purple (which is part of the colour palette). I have also added a slight green to mix with the blue and create more depth and as well as that changed the bright cian blue fog to a darker blue (since the environment is underground and there is no light coming from the surface). All these slight changes in colour and light made the environment reflect the feelings better. Then I started adding some modular assets from the marketplace in order to shaping the aread around and the city we want to create, even though this is at the moment temporary assets.  More boxes and other shapes were added to fill the background as well, which helped selling the depth and crowded city feeling. Again the pyramid textures are to be changed but overall this is the look we have so far for our game’s cinematic. 

I have created some modular pyramids to add to the environment in Unreal and start the composition as well as test the lighting and cel shade.  To create the post process cel shade I have watched a few videos (all in the miro board) in order to create my own shader, both the 3 toon shade and the thick black outline. After creating these in the blueprints I came to a result like it shows on image 5. Then the first happy accident ran accross... when I imported the exponential height fog to the project and the cel shade completely cut the fog depending on the distance set in the blueprints. So either I could have the height fog cut within a radius of distance which looked visually terrible or not have the height fog at all which was not an option since the place is supposed to be very misterious, dark and cold and the cel shade helps selling these feelings as well as the sense of depth. After researching on solutions I have decided to create my own fog in unreal, so I went back to the blueprints. Not only I have learned a lot, I found out I could add more than one fog and so I have combined blue and greeen for the background and a very dark blue fog attached to the camera or player. These would not only help sell the depth and feelings I wanted to achieve but also gave me the opportunity to apply the cold colours chosen for the game (from coolors), which I colour picked from our set palette.  The result on image 6 is how the same shader applies but now with the fogs created. Although the result looked better because now the fog was not affected by the cel shade, now the colours in the buildings looked desaturated and the lights were very dim. To tackle this, after a long research and trying different blueprints, playing around with the values, I decided to try the cel shade from unreal and see what happened.  Image 7 happened... looked much better than before... and I was frustrated to see all my hard work go down the toilet. The cel shade in Unreal had much more options to change the values in the instances. This helped me with the look, the thickness of the outline, but mainly with how flat I wanted the environment to look.. which changed a big deal and helped the colours and lights pop out much more! But something was missing... the hard colours and lines where the light casts in the models... this is when I though to maybe combine both this cel shade and the 3 tone shading, what divides how the light casts in 3, from darker to lightwer values and although it made the lights brighter, it brought the feeling of the shader and how the light casts with its hard lines, which was part of what we aimed to accomplish.  Then I textured one of the pyramids to test how the textures work in the environment but forgot that neither roughness or metalic have a great impact in a cel shaded world (image 3) and so, after disconecting these texture maps from the nodes, the result looked much better (image 4). Nevertheless, we were advised to work more on the textures to come out with a better result, perhaps something way more flat coloured (this is my next step in this project) and support with the cel shade instead of taking it away. 

Here are some of the concepts we came up with as well as the colour palette for the characters (Humans and Kybrex). Humans or Organics have a warm palette of colours whereas the Kybrex, being robotic and only 1% organic, are mainly coloured in cold colours, but with a hint of warm colours. The environment concepts were tests to create visual ideas for the game. We were inspired by various games like Halo and Destiny to create the visuals for our game with massive, imposing buildings, sculped out of simple shapes like triangules. The reason for using the triangular shapes is mainly because the environment where the humans DIVE into is an unknown dangerous dark place and the shape that best represents danger is the triangle. On the other side of the spectrum, the pyramids are all based in triangular shapes, which supports the visuals of the environment.  One of the pictures shows how the game would look like in the game interface, or the ideal we are aiming for when we push the idea beyond the cinematic trailer. 

When the environment was more or less settled, I decided to texture one of the asset pyramids. The thing is that I did not remember that with cel shade, the metal and roughness are not displayed properly because the light is different and so I was advised to retexture this model and create a more stylized piece (which are now the next steps to take!). Overall the game has come to look very solid and promising. Me and Antonio will keep working hard to come with a great cinematic in the end!

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Check this Miro Board where you can find the progress of the Environment I’m currently creating in Unreal Engine 4.  The premise of this project is to create a fusion between Modern Neon Japan and Ancient Japan.