Inspiration

I felt very interested in this project. In my previous career exploration, I found that I was more interested in texture art and environments and was keen to create more realistic, atmospheric scenes. Having worked some projects, I have become more convinced of this, and I am also better at working with textures and lighting rather than animation throughout the whole production process. This project gave me the opportunity to explore new territory. As I wanted to learn about the work of environment artists, I looked up some scenes I liked on ArtStation and decided the aim of this project: to create realistic scenes using Unreal. I’ve always been interested in learning Unreal and learning to create scenes for games, so this is an exciting experience. I searched for more scenes created in Unreal and started working on ideas for my project.

I wanted to create a cabin in the forest, I thought this type of scene would be representative and it would be easier to make the effect I wanted. I wanted to emphasise the sense of light and atmosphere, modelled in Maya and imported into Unreal, so I also looked for some images of cabins for reference.

Sketches

I collected different kinds of cabins for reference and then tried to draw some thumbnails, which we also used in the Production Principles project, and I think it worked very well, as it simply summed up the desired atmosphere. I chose a favourite thumbnail to draw a draft of and settled on my three main objects: the hut, the bridge and the boat.

I then drew up some sketches for the hut and the boat to establish the general style in preparation for the modelling.

Considering the size of the model in Unreal, I modelled it with reference to a human model to give it a more reasonable size. When creating the wood, I tried to change the dimensions of some of the wood to make them look less regular. Next, I created the bridge and the boat, reusing a lot of wood since I thought it was a nice way to save time while maintaining a consistent modelling style.

I wanted to edit the UVs while saving some space. This time I split the models into four UVs, and as the split models were rather messy, I used different layers to distinguish them. To get a better distribution of the mapping, I adjusted the size of the UV shells to make them as uniform as possible across the model. This took some time and reminded me to learn some new ways and hope able to split UVs in a quicker way.

Texturing

I created the textures for the main objects in Substance Painter. As this is a log cabin in the forest I wanted it to look a bit ruined and damp, I created dirty stains with masks and also added water stains to some areas.

I wanted to add some thatch to the roof so I sculpted it in ZBrush to give it the look of a stack of layers. Here I wanted to try out Quixel Mixer and after asking our tutor Sam, I learned that Quixel Mixer is more suitable for materials such as terrain. So I created a texture in both software to try and see which one worked better in Unreal.

Unreal Engine

When I first started with Unreal, I was very confused. I tried to create terrain and materials but it didn’t work well. I tried to import Maya’s Fbx file, but I don’t know how to set it up. This made me realise that I needed to learn the basics of Unreal first, so I found some video to follow along with, and for the work process, I referred to the relevant ArtStation Learning video.

After doing that, I re-imported the Maya model and created the terrain roughly, I think it looks much better.

Material and Megascans

I carried over all the exported textures to Unreal to make the Material, converting the textures into parameters for replacing other textures. I was also introduced to the new texture, which combines Metallic, Roughness, Ambient Occlusion into different channels, I found this very useful and also saved some space.

As my version is Unreal 4, I set up the Megascans plugin for the project to facilitate the import of the 3D assets and plants inside. This gave me a lot of freedom to create the scenes I wanted, and also, the assets gave me more inspiration.

When making the materials for the terrain, I created different layers for drawing the different textures, using the clay and darker colours for the underwater, and I increased the material density of the grass to make it look more delicate at a greater distance.

Lighting

I experimented with adjusting different values to affect the lighting and added fog to make the more distant views look hazier. The lighting has a big impact on the atmosphere of the scenery and after experimenting with different lights I decided to create a sunset scene, I downloaded a blueprint of sky from Epic’s store and made some adjustments.

Rendering and Final adjustments

When making the final adjustments, I added some decal such as thatch, cracks and branches to give a richer look to the scenery.

I tried to create some flickering effects to give the scene more richness.

Finally, I used Sequencer to create the video clips and camera tracks, and then used Movie Render Queue for the final rendering and adjustments to make the rendering less aliasing and improve the quality of the render.

Reflection

Through this project, I was able to get a basic understanding of the use of Unreal and how to create a more complete environment. I’m happy with the results so far, but I also have so many things to learn. I enjoyed creating a scene like this and it was really rewarding to see the renders. It also reinforced my desire to continue learning more about Unreal and I want to get familiar with the scene production workflow and create more scenes to enhance in the next exercises. One regret is that there are not many modeling parts to this scene and it is not very detailed, I would like to improve this in my next practice and create a more elaborate prop with high poly. I also want to create my own materials for the scenes to be able to create even more unique and nice environments in the future.

Final Outcome

Video Reel: