#futureworksxb2002

XB2002 Assignment Three - Environment Art

The Environment Art Scene Fly Through and Trailer:

For my final development milestone of my low poly environment, I created a flythrough/reveal trailer for the whole environment scene itself.

For the trailer, my main focus was to capture the majority of the environment within the Unreal project and have a seamlessly smooth transition throughout the whole thing for the camera’s projectile path it takes.

For the camera and video itself, the video was captured on a matinee keyframe animated camera, and upon completion of the matinee’s route rendered out the Matinee’s movie projected path at a 1080p 60 frames per second video at the MP4 format.

From here it was the case of taking the Unreal matinee movie and importing it into Adobe Premiere Pro and adding visual effects such as the transition to white in the title and credits scene and adding the soundtrack Floating Home over the video.

Within Adobe Premiere Pro I also compressed and rendered the video from its initially slow speed Unreal video file, and from here was able to acquire the smooth flow of movement visible in the video above.

I am very satisfied with the final version of the reveal trailer for the whole low poly environment scene, as it has allowed me to develop my 3D modelling, environment art, and Unreal materials skillsets.

One of the design challenges I faced within the video creation process of the project was creating the right visual effects for the video to make it more professional, as my creative milestone aim for this video was to create a fly through that resembles that of an actual game reveal trailer.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene:

Floating Rocks & Hot Air Balloon animations:

Above is a small video clip of the floating low poly rock and hot air balloon animations that are present within my low poly environment for XB2002 and are what I shall be having present within my final trailer for the project.

One of the key characteristics and visual attractions present within my low poly environment for XB2002 is the floating low poly rocks present within the atmosphere surrounding the island, I chose to include these meshes within the environment as they are a visual aid in communicating to the player the narrative of the high altitude they are in within this environment, and having the rocks float through the air within the viewer's perception with the low poly earth planet in the distance will add emphasis on the environment being within a location far from planet earth.

For the animations present within the environment, I have used Unreal matinee’s as primary way for crafting the specific animations and movements I desired, I used matinee’s for the balloon and rocks as matinee would allow me to create different movements the further down the matinee’s timeline for the meshes, thus through this I could have all the rock meshes move within unique ways around the atmosphere to simulate that of realistic zero gravity environments.

As you can see in the video the rocks that are floating within the environment are all moving within unique pathways of each other and no rock repeats the same pattern and the hot air balloon moves away from the environment into the sky in a natural pattern as if it is being blown away by the course of the wind within the environment high altitude, the results seen within, the video were achieved by manually crafting the pathways of each movable object within the scene as you can see within the screenshots above.

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of the of the animations of the moveable objects within the environment as it has allowed me to create some additional visual narrative that will help strengthen the engagement of the final project video trailer.

References:

Music used within this video was produced by Futureworks Training Limited, Music Production student Martyn Stonehouse for this project and its end of project trailer.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene: 

Upon completion of all the models needed for the low-poly island environment scene, I began the process of placing all the meshes in Unreal upon importing their FBX files into organised folders.

I began the process of creating the environment by first selecting the type of lighting, originally my initial concept idea for the lighting in the scene was to have the scene set at night with a snow particle system being present throughout the environment.

However, upon looking back at the snowy countryside photography photographs I had taken for environment set piece placement reference, I saw how the different lighting of both sun and cloud can affect a heavy snow environment, one example is the photography photo’s of the snowy forest in this post, in the first image we can see the general white skies often associated with snowy weather patterns and the transition from this to a clear sunny sky and how both alter and affect the lighting patterns within the environment the light casts onto.

Thus upon examining actual lighting caused by snowy weather, I chose to create a sky that combined the snowy clear pink skies often seen after the snow has finished falling within an area and the clear blue sky of the sun creeping through the clouds type of lighting effect that comes once the colour palette of a snow sky begins to fade.

As you can see in the screenshots above I have managed to create a sky sphere and lighting that combines both the clear blue weather sky lighting and pink snowy lighting together into a nice contrast with no clear horizon line showing, allowing me to have an environment with a seamless skydome lighting texture that manages to suit the environmental narrative of the whole scene taking place high up in the sky.

In the screenshots above you can also see that at this stage I have begun the process of asset placement within the scene using my photography reference photo’s you can see I placed assets such as tree’s and snow clumps within similar spots to that of my photo’s, I have placed the assets in such a manner as this has allowed me to create a forest environment that resembles that of an actual organic forest, as the spacing of both the tree’s and the snow is based on that of actual fallen snow and the spacing of it and actual forest trees.

One of the key development milestones that I aimed to tackle with this environment scene was to whilst maintaining the low-poly art style create organic and realistic geography for the organic mesh asset placement and through the use of the photography photo references I believe I have been able to hit this milestone of the development cycle of the environment scene.

In terms of additional lighting to add to the low poly atmosphere and art style I deleted the original sun within Unreal Engine and created my own low poly sphere mesh and created a luminate sun yellow material for the mesh, this as a resulted managed to create the nice light yellow lighting present within the screenshots, and manage to create an atmosphere of winter now coming to an end and summer beginning to set in.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene: 

Continuing to develop my low poly environment for XB2002 Environment Scene I have created several meshes that I aim to have present within the environment and that match the low poly art style I am basing my environment around aesthetically.

As you can see I have modelled three new type of tree, the top tree screenshot was a branching type of low poly tree I aimed to create for this scene, for the actual tree’s themselves I created a platonic primitive and used the smooth function to round the shape to a spherical shape, followed by hardening the edges and then reducing the poly count of platonic shape to get the rounded shape of the tree, from here it was a simple matter of using the scale, vertex and reduce tools to create different types of low poly tree sphere shapes for the tops of the tree meshes.

The Windmill mesh was an asset I had previously made that I decided to use for the project, the only change from the original windmill mesh is that I placed a stand in the middle by creating a cylinder primitive and removing the line segments from it and hardening the edges to acquire the low poly shape, style and geometry.

From here I placed the shape in the centre of the windmill tower mesh and created some cubes to act as the leg supports for the windmill and placed them around the windmill stand to create structural authenticity and realism for the structure.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene: 

For my low poly environment art scene the key central model throughout the whole environment is the low poly island itself.

Above you can see some early renders and screenshots of the overall shape I am creating for the island, for the shape of the island I constructed it using a cube primitive mesh, then added multiple line segments to it, then used the triangulate and reduce mesh function on the island mesh to reduce the polygon count to achieve the triangular low poly art style look that I aim to have the environment possess in terms of aesthetics.

Although this an early development version of the model you can see that I have begun the process of including characteristics that I designed within my initial concept art sketch of the island mesh such as rocks being layered on top of the base rock and rocks surrounding the island itself.

These characteristics are being implemented into the final environment model itself to add the sub-narrative of the island breaking apart.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene: 

This concept art sketch is an initial concept idea I currently have for my low poly sky island snowy environment scene for XB2002.

Initially when sketching the shape of the island I wanted to create something that would allow be able to possess the low poly art elements of low poly art but also allow me to create an island that’s shape will create the established narrative that it is had been breaking apart.

I will cement this narrative within the actual environment itself by using already built low poly rocks by having them floating around the environment in Unreal through most likely the use of a Matinee animation and by potentially having the low poly rocks be moulded into the base shape of the island itself.

For the low poly tree’s due to already creating them XB2001 Level Design I shall be re-using these assets but will be adding an additional snow layer texture to the mesh through either face selection and applying lambert materials or through manually painting the snow texture on them in Unreal or Substance Painter.

For the windmill model this is also another pre-built asset I have created, I have decided to add this into the scene for aesthetic purposes and will re-create the UV map for the mesh to a much better quality standard, I may also potentially have the turbines on the windmill performing a rotation animation by having the turbines as separate meshes and by using a matinee in Unreal Engine to animate them.

For the cabin itself I plan to create a simple low poly red wood cabin mesh that will be applied with low poly wood textures to match the rest of the low poly environments theme, I may also have light rays emitting from the windows to add the narrative and characteristics that someone is living on the island in the sky.

For the lake flowing off the island at the moment this is pure initial concept idea, if later in the project I have the development time to develop this aspect of the environment I shall pursue it as getting a working low poly water material to work and flow off an island may take serious development time out of the project timetable.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene:

Above are screenshots of previous low poly assets, modelling and environment scenes I have created within my spare time.

As you can see when learning and developing my low poly modelling creative skillsets I have created a wide variety of different locations and assets to suit the theme, and I will be using similar workflows to help construct my low poly environment low poly sky island scene for XB2002.

XB2002 Assignment Three: Environment Scene:

For my environment scene for XB2002 I decided to do some photography for reference sources when planning on creating my low poly snowy sky island environment for the project.

I will be using the folder of snowy countryside photography images as a reference source for three main aspects of the environment scene for when it is imported into Unreal Engine, lighting, terrain, and snow materials.

As you can see from the images I have taken I have captured the different types of countryside terrain types and different sky lighting and how it affects the snow it blankets.

These types of photography shots will be reference point for how I use lighting such as the skyphere in Unreal Engine to affect the painted on snow material that will blanket the surface of the low poly island itself.

These images will also be assisting me in what type of snow texture I aim to create as a paintable texture through the use of Unreal paint tool, as you can see the snow itself adapts and changes to suit the tye of countryside terrain it landed on, in some areas pockets of grass break through and in others it completely blankets the terrain it lands on where only the sheet of snow is visible.