The Animal Shrine - Final Post
(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)
Here we are. The end. I can't believe it. This is the first project of such a big scale that I've done in 3D, and it was quite the ride! As I promised, I worked a lot on a video, in order to show you the idea of the whole place.
The Animal Shrine. As some of the Japanese texts I have on the walls of my Calligraphers Workshop suggest, this shrine is a place where you can leave gifts and pray to different animals. At first, it sounds like it is a thing for fortune, and good health, but read deeper and you shall come across sentences like "Those who bring gifts shall have powers...", "Point at your enemies and the animals shall follow..." and "The commander of the animals".
But before I say anything more, here is the video. Enjoy:
In Japanese culture, as well as in lots of others, the animals I have depicted have a very common appearance. In Japan rabbits are thought to bring fertility, cranes were thought to be immortal and as such were considered secret. Frogs, some say, bring luck. All of that is referenced on the walls of the Calligraphers, but I wanted to take it further. See if I could come up with something more mysterious and weird. And then actually have a go at executing it and telling it as a story through a video.
It was quite the challenge, I will tell you, and I redid that video about 4 times. Unreal's Sequencer gave me lots of trouble too. It was good though, that along the way of making my props, I was exposing every single parameter possible. That gave me control over the colors of the lights, and the glowing eyes.
Some more screenshots:
I have a second video for you. A sort of a development time-lapse:
I did not take 431 screenshots, in order to have them unrecorded and not seen... This is not all of them, of course, but I made sure to take lots of specific angles through the making, and them combine them in a video. Hope you find it interesting.
(I'm quite happy with this shot, but I am leaving it down here, in the hopes that you first see it in the Video, and won't get the whole surprise element spoiled.)
But now lets go to some technical talk. I recorded the scene in real time. The FPS is around 40-50 constant, but would occasionally drop down to 25-30 when looking through the cameras that overlook absolutely the whole place. I think you can feel a few frames drop on the first video.
At some point I was kind of convinced that I will not be able to record anything in real time, given that I am pushing my models and textures to appeal visually at their best. LODs are something I would love to do, but maybe not in a short challenge like this. I've tried to be very reasonable with my choice of texture sizes and my stacking of multiple objects on one texture sets. My machine is not bad, but it is by no means top-end either. I have a strong video card (gtx 1070), but pretty outdated CPU and only 8 gb of RAM. As such I am actually pretty happy with how the scene is running.
Let's see my Materials and Call-out sheet for my models:
First row: paper, gold, porcelain, bamboo. Second row is my landscape blending materials plus a weird looking hay I used for the "hanging rope" detail piece you can see in the second picture.
First row is some basic wood materials I did in Substance. I then combined them in different ways, using Smart Masks in Painter. Last material is the stone I use in the scene. I made a simple one with exposed parameters for cracks and for hue. I then overlaid green version on top in order to make some cheap moss effect.
This project was lots of fun to do guys. I haven't been to bed all night. I mean, its morning here in the UK right now, but when I woke up around 20 hours ago, to begin work on this, I knew it was going to be my final day on it. It made me feel kind of weird, melancholic. It's stupid, I know, but lots of you are so amazingly good at what you do, my only chance to catch up was to work crazy hours. And in those crazy hours, I got so used to this project, I feel like I'm gonna feel empty for a quite a while, given that I will not wake up to have a stroll in it first thing.




















