Month: May 2020
UE4- Environments #9
For the last scene of the film I wanted to bring it back to the butterfly, however after I did the first render of the butterfly on the flower I thought that after witnessing the child being kidnapped into a life of war and slavery that the flower was the wrong choice. The butterfly on the gun brings together the innocent and free child at the beginning with the child slave kidnapped into war, it brings the juxtaposing representations of the child together in a tragic visual metaphor.
I played about with composition to see what might work best and so I settled on the lower angle.
UE4- Environments #8
Easiest til last; Or so I thought
Render_01 
Render_02
After I had finished the first render (render 01), during feedback Gerard suggested that like the storyboard I stick to the fully silhouetted render and not have any light on the child at all, so I quickly corrected it.
Running Into More Problems
Originally I had animated the butterfly so that it pivoted at the the bottom of its wings and I simply key-framed the rotation of the wings and exported the file as a game export in maya and imported it into Unreal but unfortunately for some reason it wasn’t working. I followed the instructions on the forums and on YouTube videos explaining how to import key framed objects but it wasn’t working, there wasn’t many ways around it and I can be quite creative a lot of the time but alas I couldn’t get round the problem. I decided that rather than hope that if I keep trying it’ll work soon or I’ll find an answer that I could rig the butterfly quickly, animate it and import it that way.
After rigging the butterfly using the advanced skeleton bug rig, I added a couple extra limb and rigged the butterfly, I just flooded the wings for each side, key framed it and exported it to Unreal and thankfully it worked.
Ronan Mallon a 3rd year student helped me out a little by animating the hand with the butterfly on the tip of his finger, I just imported them both into Unreal with no fuss in the same environment and upped the saturation a little bit to match the storyboards and it was as easy as that thankfully.
For the Final Presentation I quickly rendered out a tif sequence on maya and put it over a orange sky in After Effects just as an example of what the shot would look like and what the animation would be. However I thought it looked too flat and 2-D which I believed would mislead and disorientate people when in the next frame it jumps to a fully 3D scene so I wanted to add some dimensionality to it so as not to confuse the audience when they mistake it for a 2D film.
Its a subtle difference but with the specular highlights on the cheekbone, head and tip of the ear it adds that 3-Dimensionality to it, his shirt is a different colour too which adds some variation in the colour scale.
UE4- Environments #7
Lighting
The first shot was the original lighting after I had lit the last scene. The thing is however, its not silhouetted like in the storyboard, so I had to break the rules a little and take some liberties with the lighting to recreate that silhouette image, because the full immersiveness of the black still holds the implicit connotations that they did at the beginning of the project, nothing has changed. I played around with the light quite subtly to get different degrees of silhouette. For instance I had soldier submerged in the shadow and the boy only partly, as though the darkness has saturated most of whom he is in the frame, with still that bit of light that shines on him as a symbol of who he was and that purity. Light can also be used as a good metaphor for hope. In the end I decided to stay true to the original vision, I shined a little light on the boy to give it a little bit of 3-Dimensionality so that the silhouettes weren’t too flat and 2-D looking.
What needs done
Colour Correction 
Fix Animations 
Finish & Render Scenes
After the feedback I did a quick chronological layout to look at what needs done and where exactly I’m at. I just need to colour correct a couple scenes and fully compose, light and render 4 more scenes. That being said the lighting for the last 2 is complete because its the same one scene but I still have a couple others that needed set up, lit and rendered.
UE4- Environment #6
Firstly I imported, textured and arrangement the props and included some plants and flowers near and around the cabin as well as some branches, twigs and rocks etc. It was important that I had everything in the scene including the character as reference before I begin to light the scene.
I also like some of the last scene painted some grass textures onto the landscape so that I didn’t have to have thousands of planes of grass in my scene and I feel like it works, a lot better than the last couple of scenes that didn’t work so well at least.
Campfire
Sprites Sheet 
Material 
BP_Light_Flicker 
BP_Light_Intensity
With the use of two textures, a flame sprite sheet and a fire gradient I was able to create a campfire using the ‘unreal engine flipbook’ in the material. Using the actor & ‘Fire Blueprints’ I was able to manipulate the intensity of the fire and using the event graph editor, have the fire flickering and always facing camera which was an issue that I had when rendering.
The video tutorial that I followed along is belong if you’re interested in the details of the process.
Sticking to those original concepts I had of the isolated cabin in the forest surrounded by the trees I tried to recreate that as best as possible, I didn’t want it on a hill because I found in my research that there’s not really many flat wide hills in the Rainforests so I thought it’d be best to keep it on flat ground on the edge of the Rainforest so the silhouettes can work well in the last scene without any trees out the front of the camera distracting or taking away from the characters in the shot. I wanted to isolate the cabin in this case, have it stand out, almost as though its a character in the story as well, I didn’t want it hiding in the forest behind trees obscuring the lodge in the scene.
Lighting Tests
Final Lighting Choice
After I the assets were imported, textured and arranged it was time for the lighting tests. For the last few scenes we are at this cabin and in the last shot we have the early evening sky, still quite bright and so it was important not to contradict the lighting in every scene and have the lighting consistent throughout. I also had to keep in mind were the sun was in the sky so that the shadows weren’t casting in opposing directions. I patiently played about with the lighting, and shadows, were they cast, what was being obstructed, what needed to be seen and what was important to the scene. The specular on the ground could be distracting, the shadows could be obtrusive, and equally the lack of shadows surrounded by tall trees could be contradictory and subconsciously take away from the scene so it was important to consider these small details.
Composition
After I was happy with the lighting I experimented a little with composition, what shots could work well and could I incorporate any implicit meaning behind the composition. I wanted to create as much distance between the audience and the characters that I could, similar to the research I’ve already conducted I wanted the audience to be a witness to an atrocity, he’s helpless, hopeless and and we can’t be near him or help him, instead we just watch a cruel and eerie moment come to pass.
When the camera looks down on the subject from a high angle he gets “swallowed up”. The High-angle shots make the child appear vulnerable or powerless.
Similarly I considered low angle shots in the scenes where the captor stands behind the boy, Psychologically, the effect of the low-angle shot is that it makes the subject look strong and powerful. And by towering over the boy it can appoint that power over the child, and still yet, take the power away from the boy.
Again I’ve already storyboarded my compositions but its sometimes worth a try experimenting with the scene when its completed and almost ready to be rendered.
After Feedback
After the feedback and exactly like the other scenes we’ve discussed I went back and changed the environment around the house to imitated something closer to a Rainforest, personally I’m happier with the redesign and think it looks at least a little more appropriate.
UE4- Environment #5
First of all I thought I would paint the grass onto the landscape just to see how it would look, I just blended the Diffuse/Spec/Normals of different textures together in a material using the blend node and a texture coordinate and multiply to manipulate the UVs and then I would simply paint directly onto the landscape.
I didn’t like how it turned out, it was worth a shot but I thought it looked too unrealistic, perhaps a good technique for things in the distance like rocky/snowy/grassy mountains or hills etc but for a close up shot I wanted to use real grass. I was however able to paint out a natural path as a stencil for painting on the foliage.
Running Into Problems
When I started painting in the foliage it wasn’t coming up in the rendered video. I had no idea what the issue was, I thought after some consideration it was perhaps a scale issue but when I tested that out it wasn’t the issue, I also thought perhaps it was something to do with the camera but after playing about with the settings I assumed it wasn’t. So after searching on Youtube and going to the unreal forums to see what the issue was I found out it was to do with the cull distance when painting in the foliage. I had to extend the cull distance so the camera could pick it up in the render. Simple enough, I just had to play about with the numbers. That being said after a certain amount of distance it still wasn’t picking up the foliage in the background, so I scaled up the foliage a little and it seemed to do the trick.
After fixing the foliage issue I painted in some stones and sticks in the path just to give it a bit of extra something.
Colour Continuity
After I had some scenes rendered out I wanted to panel them just to see what the colours were like and if they were mixing okay and if it resembled my storyboards closely enough. I think that the scenes on either side of the ‘forest tunnel’ need to be a little darker and colour match the scene like the storyboards do. Its important that I replicate that in my film, its important to the story.
UE4- Environment #4
This I thought would be a challenging one and I was correct, I was having trouble with getting the cavern of trees that I had originally storyboarded. There was ways of bending the trees but they looked unnatural and it somehow worked even less, they let less light in from the top which was my main source of light but nonetheless I was patient and careful and did what I could under that the circumstances. Because the trees were so close together it was going to be dark and so I had to be creative with the lighting and the placement of the trees, as well as considering the space around the trees and not obstructing the light too much. If it was too dense in the scene it wouldn’t work but I wanted to give the allusion that we were still in the forest and that this wasn’t a tunnel of trees on a path in Ireland somewhere.
I did the best I could do under the somewhat restrictive circumstances, I too understand that its really more reminiscent of a forest, that problem that keeps reoccurring in my project but the tropical trees and palm trees and leaves didn’t quite work for this scene, but I think perhaps I might be able to get away with it.
UE4- Environment #3
Again a similar problem for this was originally I thought the shot was too bright, I wanted to be sure to keep that ominousness that I’ve been trying to capture in these last scenes. I was concerned that if it was too dark you couldn’t see whats happening or where the boy would be in the shot, however it was about achieving that gloominess and obscurity, a darkness that is evident but were you can still see whats happening.
Similarly to the last couple scenes I was making the mistake of creating a scene more akin to that of a woodland forest not a Rainforest so first of all I repainted the trees in the background with trees and foliage more affiliated with a Rainforest. I believe I was getting closer to something that I wanted, taking into consideration what Gerard said, flattening the colours of the trees and abating the detail of the trees in the background. I also pushed the trees further back to recreate that depth and enormity, the spaciousness of a Rainforest, the boy being something related to a needle in a haystack.
I wasn’t liking the heavy saturation of the moss on the fallen tree stump, for the life of me I couldn’t decrease its saturation so I considered replacing it with a similar asset
After replacing the tree and being happier with what I had now it was important to get the lighting nailed down. The 1st image above I thought was too bright and that the fallen tree in the background was a little too distracting perhaps, I wanted to really isolate the boy. Being alone in this big Rainforest running for his life I wanted to somewhat disengage him from his surroundings, its dark and unfamiliar, we don’t know what exactly is in the shadows and neither does he; everything is frightening.
Its really quite a subtle difference but I thought the second was just a tad too dark and so I increased the exposure and tilted the y axis of the camera a little bit. I think I’m happy with how it turned out and I guess I’ll just wait to here some feedback on it at the next tutorial.
Rendering Issues
After doing a test render I realised that the exposure would increase at the beginning. It was obviously very apparent and very distracting but I didn’t know how to fix it. It took me a while before I found the answer online. It was a post processing volume issue, I just had to check the infinite (unbound) box and put the exposure to min and max brightness 1.
Another problem I ran into was that the boy wouldn’t render when he was off screen. The camera would render him when he was on screen but not off. I couldn’t for the life of me find out why and I searched the highs and lows of the internet and I couldn’t find an answer anywhere. For hours I was finding hack ways around it but I obviously wanted to know what the issue and then embarrassingly I realised that you have to add the character and animation to the track editor.
Problem solved. And at least I know what the issue will be in the future and can solve it immediately.
UE4- Environments #2
My first attempt at the composition of the shot appeared a bit cluttered and the flat lighting and dark background made it a bit difficult to see what was happening in the scene. But I had the right idea for the closeup, composition and formation of the assets.
Puddle Material
To make the scene a little more interesting I added in a puddle, it adds to the wet and humid atmosphere of the Rainforest. I also changed the colour of the sky dome to something a little brighter and increased the exposure a little more just to brighten the scene a bit. I
In the background I removed the trees to create more depth to the scene to give the allusion to the large scale of the forest. I also replaced the ferns with something a little more tropical a using a blending node in the editor I was able to take away that sharp line at the edge of the puddle and get something much more realistic. I also took down the brightness down a little to match the colour and feel of the scenes on either side of this one, so that there’s a flow and you get the feeling hes on a continuitous journey through the forest and not hopping all over the place. The lighting and colour tells a story too and its important to keep that consistent.
Showreel
Above is some screenshots from my showreel, not yet fully rendered. I’m to include turntables of my models and include some of the best footage from my animation. I don’t include old models from previous years. I just feel they don’t reach the level of quality that I want to include in my showreel. It will include most of what I have modelled this year and what I will continue to create and include in my showreel after graduation.
This year I’ve been informed by a handful of the guest lectures that its most important to include your best work. That its better to have a 30 second showreel with quality work that trying to fill it out a 2 minute show reel with amateur work. I’ve also learned that its important to create dynamic, interesting poses for your models to add to the impact of the work.
Unreal Engine Environments
Initially I was just getting the lay of the land, experimenting with the foliage tool, the different assets that I could use, what trees looked the part and how the lighting interacts with the environment, the lighting will help a lot with the colour of the scene and considering colour is an important part of the story, so is the lighting in this case.
Experimenting with composition and assets I patiently composed a number of different shots with different arrangements and formations to make the scene interesting as a setting for the physical encounter between the rebel and the boy. I wanted something reminiscent of a photograph, looking at different photos online and different photographers portfolios of their journeys through rain forest, how they composed some of their shots.
I played around with the sky dome, to recreate skies more reminiscent of an early morning, that being said however, the skies in the scene behind the forest dont recreate the same colour of the storyboards or create that ominous setting evocative of the physical altercation between the boy and the rebel. The scene has to set the mood so the colour needs to be more akin to that of my storyboards, I need to be sure to keep coming back to the source material and not stray from the original vision and foundations of that. The forest has to be denser, foggier, more atmospheric.
Contextual Research
Border Ranges National Park
Initially the environments that I was creating were looking too much like a forest, I wasn’t getting those Rainforest vibes that I needed, and so I was doing the best I could with the resources and models that I had, I was looking at my research and trying to characterise what makes a Rainforest a Rainforest, what plants and trees were there, what the ground was like etc.
In the research its apparent that there’s a lot more foliage, tall foliage and twisting, crooked huge trees, leaves covering the ground, mossy rocks and rivers and ponds.
Like the greats do when they characterise a person and include and accentuate their most noticeable and prominent, important features, I had to do the same with the environment. Include the essence of the Rainforest into my environment. The things that made a Rainforest.
Second Attempt After Feedback
Quixel
Using quixel megascans and the bridge application I was able to quickly and conveniently acquire more Rainforest type assets and really start to create something like an African Rainforest. Unfortunately because there wasn’t many rain forest like assets available on the store and really just more woodland forest type assets it was rather difficult to get to the point were it was believable but I believe I did a rather good job considering the circumstances, it looks a lot more akin to a Rainforest than the previous renders.
Gerard said that it was important that I don’t stray too far between the style of the silhouettes and the rather simplistic aesthetic at the beginning of the film and wander too far into recreating something too realistic. He suggested that I flatten the colour a little, so that you don’t see every fine detail on the trees, rather to have the shapes and silhouettes of most of the nature and keep the focus on the characters.
I completely agreed and remembered to refer back to my storyboards as reference so that I don’t start straying again from the original idea. The flattening of the colours and the silhouetted trees around the characters was more consistent with the style of my story-boarded concept.
After playing about with the composition a little, I wanted to set a stage for the altercation. I didn’t want anything obstructing the view of the characters or being a distraction in the scene, so I decided to trim down the foliage a little and remove some of the trees. It still maintains the look of a Rainforest though and is a clearer stage for the most important scene in the film.
UE4 Environment Spreadsheet
Before beginning to model these environments I wanted to keep a plan of what needs completed, what computer the scenes are on and whether the lighting is complete and animations imported. It’ll be a good way to keep track of what scene is finished after I get feedback on the environments and can get the thumbs up to move on. There’s a few scenes that need done and some environments will be used for multiple scenes so its a good idea to keep track and avoid confusion, with everything coming together now, especially when things are getting stressful and more is preoccupying my mind.
duckinthesobriety 