Robert Johnson's New Media Project Blog

What’s next? Studying the digital human workflow and projects to assess the look development and material rendering to try and formulate a thesis. 

After retopology and more the teeth would not render. Maybe it was a scale thing but either way, it wasn’t gonna happen. The eyes worked but the way Unreal rendered the screen, it wouldn’t let me see it even if it was so far out of the premade eye hole.

The eyes will not render and the teeth are invisible but for the most part this is done. I will try to match the image but I think this actually looks slightly better than the original

Link to outline

One with raytracing on and the other not, to be honest I am not seeing a difference but I will let others be the judge

So I have rebuilt the material to be smarter. Utilizing material instances instead of a million materials got me back about 6-10 FPS which is quite marginal. Before and after pictures with post processing raytraced attributes on and off to follow. Additionally, the color grading tool is very powerful, I think Unreal would still benefit from some lookdev plugin, I will have to research more to see what user’s would find useful.

The process used here to create the scene does show UE4′s ability to make some aspects of lookdev easier already, but I think it can be easier. It isn’t a huge bother to create a material instance and be able to hone that specifically for every model and it is INCREDIBLY efficient depending on how robust you design the master material. But I still have yet to see a way to make it just as easy and helpful as Arnold. 

Announcement demo for UE4, the breakdown shows that the mass of the lookdev process in UE is through the post-process volume. 8 years after it has been developed and the pipeline is relatively similar. Once again, showing a change for lookdev in Unreal is necessary

An interesting read on the teams attempt to render realistically in Unreal. Compared to Disney, they made many decisions that lead to a great result. A lot of math I don’t get is thrown in this paper, but the work is clearly the foundation of how I understand the capabilities of many 3D rendering pipelines

A pretty handy video breaking down the lookdev process in UE4 for vehicles specifically. A lot of reliance on post process volumes and pre-made materials scanned in. I fell this reinforces my claim earlier that the lookdev process is becoming based on your pre-processed, good to go scanned in assets and materials. There should be a better workflow for starting from scratch.

Ninja Theory breaking down their lookdev process in UE4. It is fascinating how much effort goes into capturing real world data to match the lighting of the real world. What this workflow boils down to in a glorified reference setup. Still awesome, obviously, but lacking in the material and texture side. 

Again, top with roughness being broken up. Bottom without. Much more subtle, but, getting less plastic

I am going to look into the current and upcoming tools for lookdev in Unreal. Considering the current stage the program is in and how it is being utilized, I think adopting some tools that other programs have for look development to Unreal could make for an interesting thesis. It’s infrastructure of nodes is undoubtedly robust and with Unreal 5 coming out, I am sure it will get bigger. But, even an amateur, like myself, trying to perform lookdev in Unreal can see it’s disadvantages fairly quickly. Even after figuring out some lighting, it comes off as slow and clunky. Limitations on light intensities, attenuation radius being displayed on both sides of the light source even if it’s directional, the previously mentioned inability to limit your rendering materials texture and math nodes (I may not know where to activate the button to see it but even Unity just has this utility in their shader graph) and much more. I think Unreal could benefit from a look dev plugin or something to make the process of film level look development easier.

To show the difference, above is the map for the roughness with displacement data to break it up and the bottom is without. It is extremely subtle, but the effect is necessary to add variation. I don’t know of any lookdev tools in Unreal like in Arnold, which makes doing things like this pretty annoying. In Arnold, I can isolate any texture I want and see the result way faster. More on this topic later.

Oddly off-center, but the top image is with the displacement map breaking up the specular map and the bottom is without. Both run the same FPS, but I think it is a better look to have the displacement break things up, because everything looks so plastic currently 

Starting to implement some basic math nodes where I can to try and replicate what I did in Arnold. Color desaturation seems to have to happen overall instead of by red, green and blue values. Which is slightly unfortunate but not the end of the world. A picture detailing the implementation of the displacement map to push the specular and roughness values to their limits will be shown on a later post