#final_project

The final piece of this project was rendering. Thanks to the newly added - 4.26 - render queue, setting the shots and settings with a more confortable UI was really easy. After asking for feedback, I noticed that the main building was too contrasting on the more distant shot, so I decided to make a couple of close ups.

A version without voiceover can be found here:

This last stretch I have been working on the clouds and a bit of layout. I have been following this tutorial about Ghibli clouds and it has been really interesting. He uses noises and normal maps as a way to work with the light within the renderer. 

The main problem that we have, similarly to the trees, is that Unreal Engine doesn’t have many of the features that Eevee does. For example, the color ramp is non-existent. We could have done as we did with the trees and take them to Unreal Engine and then hand make a colour ramp but... I thought it would be a better idea just to render the clouds with a transparent background and take them to UE. 

This way the are planes, they don’t need to be 3D. Cheaper, and give a sense of scale, as really distant clouds don’t move when you do. 

It makes a really big difference, I recommend checking out the previous posts and compare the image with and without clouds!

Today we are coming back to the post-process material we had, and I wanted to have a look at masking. Right now the outline is applied to everything, including the skybox, and although there is a manual way to mask these things, I believe automating it would be best.

First of all, we would have to enable the custom depth stencil. This will allow us to select specific objects and make them render on a different layer. We will be able to get this information then and use it to mask our post-processing.

After this, we can get it into our post-process material with the scene texture -> custom stencil.

To get the information, we can just go to the mesh and tick the Render CustomDepth Pass checkbox and set our value to a number. As we want a true or false - these can range from 0 to 255 - I just selected 1.

The problem with this approach is that it would apply to the whole element, not taking into consideration any occlusion.

To solve this, I found this clever solution online. Using a custom code node, instead of the Scene Texture stencil, BYC writes this code:

First, we make check for the Scene Textures. After that, we gather the Screen Space Data from the viewport with the Screen Position UVs, and then subtract to the custom depth that we got the depth data, ceiling and clamping this afterwards. These are made to get integers rounded up and set between 0 and 1. With this information, we multiply by an alpha that we set, to lower the values.

Now we can see that the depth is taken into consideration when calculating the values of the custom stencil, and allows for a much better look.

As this kind of sharp lines doesn't suit very well the environment, there is an opacity value that Lerps between the normal screen values and the post process values depending on the range that we set. This way we can have a more subtle look to it.

This is how it looked before any post process. It is a very subtle change, but I believe it adds to it, and I got to learn a lot from this experience.

In order to follow the concept we talked about previously, I had to make some changes though. 

If you look at the first implementation of this concept we can see that although similar, it lacked some depth to it.

The colours used by Diana show why it looks flat:

There is some variation depending on the distance to the camera. I was a bit stuck here, as I wasn’t able to hand paint the floor without losing the grass. For some reason it didn’t allow me to add other grass outputs in the Landscape material for the different layers. This was a bit dump on my part, as you can just add it to the existing one. This way I painted some colour variation, and the results are very different in my opinion.

The previous layout seemed a bit flat. I hadn’t considered how it seemed before, so I had just been creating the tech to support the scene.

Old layout.

After talking with some friends, they recommended that I chose some other views, even doing some concepts for me. I am very lucky to be honest, as they have been of great help.

The main one I have followed is the next one. It gives a sense of direction and perspective, while filling the areas that would remain empty.

And although I have reduced a bit the distance, I must admit that it looks significantly better.

Though there are some alternative views that I would love to implement and that I believe would be great too. But I depend on creating the clouds still.

Something that has also changed has been the shading on the Trees and Rocks. Before, the trees had the fake highlights + a lit material, while the rocks had full on texturing.

This has changed recently for the approach of all unlit + fake highlights. It works wonders as it is on the trees, but the rocks required a bit more work, specifically with the transition, which was done by applying a texture to the threshold, so it looked a bit more rough.

It results on a better look and more importantly closer to the references

These days I have been working on the main building. As I have mostly used techniques already explained I thought there was little to write about, but today, while creating the main walls, I realised that I had to do something else.

The approach I have taken is a bit different than the usual UVs -> Substance Painter -> Unreal Engine, but rather, after doing the UVs, I created a material in Susbtance Designer that would serve as a base. Ignore the colours as they haven’t been tweaked yet.

This tileable material would be good enough for me to just apply it to the UVs, but some would look a bit weird, so by baking a mask with the curvature map and some painting in Substance Painter, I can apply a darker shade onto the building on itself.

This helps everything blend together a bit better, while maintaining the quality of a high-resolution texture. As the mask only is applied as an on-off.

These days I have been working on a set of tools that would help me achieve the look I want on the environment.

How my spline tools work, the base comes from this tutorial, is by spawning an object per each spline point, excepting the last one, with the data of the position and tangent of the spline points themselves.

My personal touch comes on setting variability on those settings, so that it is not strictly on the points themselves but on random values that are nearby them. These values are fully customizable in editor.

And example of it working can be seen on this gif.