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:

Inspiration

We went to view Tate’s exhibition together at the start of term and learned a lot.

My group are Tara Jackson and Unisha Thapa and we had a lot of discussions together before deciding on David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ as our theme.

We created a miro and put in a collection of images to communicate. We wanted to retain the artistic style of the original work and to create a ‘shuttle’ animation into the painting after seeing a camera ad with cool transitions.

Storyboard and Animatic

We then moved on to storyboarding, where we discussed the story’s direction before sketching out a storyboard for each person. It was a nice thing that we always did everything in communication and wanted everyone to be involved. This method of distribution, I believe, will be carried over to our group’s future work.

In class, we established the story: a person approaches the toilet, then the camera goes through the toilet, into the water stirring up a splash and swimming into David Hockney’s painting.After that, we were assigned the job of making the animatic: Unisha made shot 1, Tara was shot 2 and I was in charge of shot 3. Finally, we put together the shots we had made.

Shot 1

Camera Tracking

As the shot1 scenes were realistic, we shot the school toilets and let Unisha do the camera tracking in Nuke. This was our first collaboration between different software. At the beginning, Unisha placed some small balls in Nuke to allow us to better determine the position of the characters in Maya. However, we soon ran into difficulties with the balls not displaying well in Maya, which we solved by re-tracking the camera in Nuke and repositioning the balls.

After we tried to find the position of the figure in Maya, I placed the camera track in Maya and made sure we could see it in the camera. I’ve had some issues with importing image sequences, but I’ve found that I can use the ‘File. Image number. File type’ naming allows Maya to find these files and play them successfully. And if I set the Depth farther away, it ensures that the characters are displayed in front of the image sequence.

Modelling

I created some of the props here, such as the beach chair and the towel.

Shot 2

We wanted to achieve some interesting effects in the second shot, jumping into the water into the world of the painting, which is like a channel. This scene we intended to create in Maya and at first we wanted to create some interesting effects like jelly, some stretching.

In the end we opted for bubbles. I wanted to make them inside Maya’s Fx and looked up some video on YouTube to learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68UGgyEH4e0

I created the Emitter using nParticles to create the bubble effects and after being happier with the results, I handed the file over to Tara to create the camera for the shot.

Shot 3

Modelling and texturing

For Shot 3, I was charged with modelling the scenes and create splash effects. To make the rendering closer to David Hockney’s original painting, I recreated the size and position of the painting as closely as possible when modelling, and the size of the house was referenced to adult scale.

For the house texturing, I used Substance Painter because I wanted the render to seem more like the drawing, but it didn’t help much. I tried to get the colours closer, but Maya’s Ai Standard Surface achieves a relatively good result. Despite this, I kept the textures made by Substance Painter, which still gives the house a more substantial look.

When making the material for the window, I tried to create a transparent material directly in Substance Painter to show the house and plants using the reflections, but it failed, and it did not appear as a reflection in Maya. So I switched it up and painted the house and plant texture in Photoshop, then put it into Substance Painter as a texture and adjusted the reflections.

Rendering test

When testing the rendering I found that the image was too exposed and could not be improved by reducing the intensity of the Skydome. I then searched online and found that selecting Enable in the Color management in the Preferences window and changing the input colour space for hdr to Raw can made the exposure smaller.

Splash

In fact, the making of the splash took me a lot of time. The reason for this is that there are many steps in making the splash, and each time I try a new value, I have to wait a long time for the effect to load, and there are also problems in the process, such as the splash suddenly going wrong in the rendering, and the splash being lost in the collision and having no effect, which commonly appear at the beginning.

But it was nice to be able to solve these problems as I got better at this production method. I used the Boss editor to create the water surface, then created an animation of a ball going through the water and used Bifrost to create a collision on the water surface. On my first attempt these splashes did not appear at all until I discovered that it could only be produced on ‘play every frame’.

Try different values for the splash:

I tried a lot of different values in the hope of achieving a better splash effect. In the end I was going to use a trajectory that made the ball move upwards rather than downwards, as this made the splash look higher. After this, I added foam to it.

Rendering

Once that was done, I exported the splash and foam and saved it as StandIn to make sure it could be transferred between us. In fact, I don’t think the splash was clear enough after the export, which may have been caused by the lighting and the textures, but we left it as it now, which I think we can work out how to export better next time.

We then started to put our separate pieces of work together and we worked out some file export errors and tried to render and hand the image sequences to Unisha for compositing.

Final Outcome

Getting started: Inspiration and Storyboard

At the beginning of the project I tried to make a Mind Map first to find ideas and directions for the project. After that I had some general ideas and some initial key words for my project: children, colour, dolls, dream. Then based on these I came up with, I looked for some storyboards and pictures to search for further inspiration.

With some ideas in mind, I drew up three shots to try and tell a coherent story.

Animatic

Based on the previous three shots drafts, I thought about the placement of the camera and the structure of the story, drawing the storyboard and creating the animatic, which tells the story of a little girl in bed looking at a storybook with a picture of a doll that comes to life and has magic. However, in the night, her doll comes to life and cover her with a quilt. I wanted the story to be easy and sweet, so I opted for a more cartoonish design when considering the modelling.

Exercise: modelling

During the course we practised modelling at different levels of complexity, which I found useful as it contained some very useful modelling techniques.

Modeling

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I searched for some illustrations of the house for reference and drew some drafts. Being a cabin in the woods, it should be made mostly of wood. I wanted it to look more stylized, so designed an irregular chimney on the house. While looking for inspiration I found the effect of cutting out layers of paper interesting and wanted to use the clouds and the moon as flat models, like cut-out pieces of paper, to give the overall effect a more child style.

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I tried a few methods and found some difficulty in creating the curves, my tutor Sam showed me a very useful method of using Adobe Illustrator to draw the curves and import them into Maya, after which I made more drafts to add details to the model.

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In order to add details to the model, I have created tiles for the roof. I found that when copying all the tiles and passing the attributes (UVs), I tended to have problems with the UVs can’t layout. Considering that I wanted to make textures for the different tiles, in the future I will make UVs before copying, which might solve the problem.

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As I needed two scenes for my shots, I also looked for references to the interior set-up. I designed the furniture for the room in a child’s style, adding some decorative items such as books and a sofa.

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Exercise: Animation and Rigging

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In the process of learning Rigging and animating with Bullet, I gained a deeper knowledge of animation in Maya, although problems arose in the process of using Bullet, which was solved in time by adjusting the values. Here I felt very rewarding and they laid some foundation for the animation part.

Texturing

I wanted the house to have more color with a warmer overall color palette so I drew the house and tried to give it a more comfortable look with different colors.

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In fact, I made almost all of the textures using the Substance Painter. I sorted the different models and cropped the UVs to reduce the number of pages of textures needed as much as possible. In the process, I created edge smears for many of the materials to hopefully make them look more realistic in the render.

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It took me quite a while to cut the UVs and create the textures in Substance Painter, it was easy to find errors in the UVs when importing the models into the software, so I was constantly going back and forth between the two software programs to modify the UVs. When I first created the textures for the books, I put all their UVs together. Later I decided that this was too time-consuming and inefficient, so I singled out some of the books and drew and pasted the materials(https://www.textures.com/) in Photoshop and utilized them several times.

I created the rough terrain undulations in ZBrush and finally painted the effect I wanted in Substance Painter using different materials and mask overlays, which gave me satisfaction.

For the final part of the scene, to give the ground a richer look, I downloaded the model of the tree on TurboSquid(https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/blender-carrot-crystal-oak-tree-3d-model-1189852#) and imported it into the scene, giving it new textures.

Lighting

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As I wanted the outside of the house to be at night, I tried different lights to achieve the night effect but without being too dark. I used a night skydome light and turned the intensity down. To have a moonlight effect I set a parallel light and a darker area light in front of the house, also in front of the moon, and turned the light to light blue and light purple to make the light appear to be shining from the front. I set up the glow for the moon and the street light bulb, adjusted for a more appropriate brightness, and then set up two Area lights next to the clouds to blend in with the lights next to them.

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As it is night outside, the light coming in from the outside of the room should not be too strong. At first, I used skydome light as the main light source, but it was too bright and after replacing HDRI I reduced the intensity of the skydome. Considering the interior lighting, I switched to using area light for the main lighting, which can leave a more pronounced shadow in the room.

Animation

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I was looking for a rig to animate and finally downloaded a dog character from Lots of Freebies, Douglas the Corgi(https://brandonschaal.gumroad.com/l/Douglas), which I thought was cute and a good fit for my scene. After downloading it, I tried some simple poses and downloaded the AnimSchool Picker(https://www.animschool.com/pickerInfo.aspx), unfortunately, when I imported the character into the scene the Picker would not open and the computer would crash.

I hadn’t done any animation on dogs, so I watched some videos and movements of dogs and recorded them as a reference for the animation.

As my character changed to a dog, some changes needed to be made to the storyboard. Based on the three previous shots, I altered the plot of the story: the puppy was playing with the ball in bed and it fell, but the puppy was sleepy and didn’t pick it up. Miraculously, the ball rolled back on its own and returned to the sleeping puppy.

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With the storyboard ready to go, I reworked the camera movements and started animating the ball. There are two types of trajectories for the ball, falling off the bed and rolling on a flat surface. For the falling animation, I drew the trajectory of the bouncing ball for reference. To better adjust the movement of the ball I turned on the display of the trajectory and adjusted the animation with the Graph Editor. Considering the texture of the ball, it also needs to be rotated during movement.

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According to the reference, I adjusted the sitting position in shot 2 and the lying position in shot 3. I had some trouble in adjusting the lying position, the dog’s hind legs twisted easily at the joint with the body. This took me some time to make it look as natural as possible. I designed small movements for the dog’s ears and body so that they didn’t look too stiff in the animation. The wagging of the tail also helps to make the movements look more realistic.

Rendering

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For rendering efficiency, I usually turn down the test resolution when viewing the render. Sometimes the material viewed in Maya will not be quite the same as the rendered one, especially when opening the project on a different computer, and the render needs to be checked often. After doing all the work, I used the school’s Renderfarm to render my project and although I encountered a few errors, I was able to fix most of them by resubmitting once I became familiar with the rendering process.

Reflection

In this 3D project, I went through a complete 3D animation production process. From pre-production to the final output, this has allowed me to become more familiar with 3D animation production and to discover the parts that interest me more. In the same way, it is also challenging. As problems keep arising, I am used to searching for solutions on the internet myself, which will allow me to become more familiar with such difficulties as I solve them. For the texture part, I spent a lot of time creating different looks for almost all the models. Looking at it now, I don’t need to spend so much time doing this, some of the less important items can be replaced with a simpler material and a good result can be achieved. The large number of materials also causes resource problems. Too many files cause Maya to become less efficient on my computer, and likewise more software problems. I think I need to learn how to save resources and be more efficient afterwards. There was also the issue of timetabling, although we created a schedule before the project started, I found that I didn’t follow it properly. Stretching out one part of the time only takes time away from other parts, and I need to improve my time management. Another idea is about the production order, if there are another 3D animation project, I would like to put the animation and characters before the texturing, so that the movements can be adjusted better to reduce lagging and to allow more time. Overall, I have gained a lot from this project and I am more than satisfied with the final result of the scene. I like modelling and texturing the scene and the characters but I will also try to improve other parts in my future studies.

Final Output

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

‘Final Outcomes’ Reel:

Music and sounds

Reference website:

freesound: https://freesound.org/browse/

uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/browse/music/easygoing

aigei: https://www.aigei.com/