Sunday 26 October 2014

4th Week Final Film Room Project


The final week for me was spent making sure everything was in engine properly and that our final scene matched the film shot as much as possible.


There’s a big shaft of light that cuts through the scene that shines through the multi coloured windows, I did consider the possibility of making that a decal on the floor seen as the brief for this project is not to make a playable level, it just needs to be an exact copy of the shot from the film and nothing else. But instead I did some research into the lighting in Unreal 4 and found that there was a way to shine light through a semi-transparent object and retain the objects colour information and project that onto other objects in the scene.


In Unreal 4 you can make a post processing volume to adjust the colours of an area. Our textures were slightly off from the colours of the actual film, so I created one of these volumes just to get it to match up with the film a bit better. Here’s a GIF that shows you the before and after adding the post processing volume:



I’m not 100% happy with how the project ended up, there are issues with the lack of grunge and wear and tear of the textures I produced, my textures were far too clean. Due to the way you get Unreal to cast coloured light meant that I could only apply an albedo to the texture of the glass to get the lighting results that I wanted. Looking back I could’ve added another plane slightly in front of the glass which doesn’t cast shadows and has a clear albedo but has a roughness and texture map on, so hopefully that would produce the light beams that I wanted and make the glass look more realistic by utilising other texture maps such as normal and roughness maps. There were quite a lot of reflections in the glass surfaces in the film still that we chose that we didn’t get to put into our scene. The casted red light on the floor isn’t quite vibrant enough, the red part of that casted light should be more over to the left, there isn’t that much yellow on that main beam of light in the reference image.  Also the resolution of the shadows on the floor and walls were at quite a low resolution and I couldn’t seem to fix that, so I’d like to find out why that was in future and prevent it from happening again. As a stretch goal it would’ve been nice to make it a sort of playable level that you could walk through, instead we just fulfilled the brief in just making that one shot look like our reference where if you move the camera you see that it isn’t a real room.
 

So to conclude I’d go back into the textures and grunge them up a bit to make the scene look more naturalistic, I’d find a way to apply different maps to textures that allow coloured light to shine through them (e.g. the windows), I’d like to have replicated the reflections on the glass that the film shot had and it would’ve been great to have made the level playable.



Here’s a Gif showing how the two match up:


And here's our final scene on it's own:



Sunday 19 October 2014

3rd Week Film Project Continued


At the beginning of the second week of the Film Room Project everyone had modelled their assets and were ready to be placed into the same scene to replicate the room from Her. Monday morning I got everyone to send me their assets as one mesh with the pivot in the centre of the scene so that I could easily import them into the scene and they would be in the correct position.



Flicking between our scene we had made and the film screenshot we had I saw that there were quite a few differences, in some instances the models were perfectly fine, but in the shot of the film the objects looked different, I assume it was because of lens distortion and possibly some forced perspective created by the creators of the film. So I made a note of what needed to be changed to the meshes and sent them back out to the group.


We decided that we were determined to achieve near perfect in the placement of the meshes, so we spent until Wednesday touching up and giving critique to each other, in some cases it was easier for me to fix it up myself rather than sending it back to the person who was making it.



From Wednesday on we saw that we had done what we could to perfect the positioning of our meshes, it was now time to move onto texturing and unwrapping. On Thursday I began putting everything into engine, to make sure every mesh was separate in engine and also was in the same position as the max file I exported the whole scene as one mesh as well as individually. First I imported the whole scene as one mesh into Unreal as a guide and then put all of the individual assets in the correct place. 

 By Friday all of the meshes were in Unreal, texturing was the next step to do over the weekend. Here's the banner Kieran Burke made for our presentation:
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Saturday 11 October 2014

2nd week start of Film Room Project


So in this project we have been tasked to recreate a film shot perfectly as a group, the project was set on Monday and we chose the image above from the movie 'Her'. Although we chose the image on the Monday we had to wait until the Thursday for the image to be green lit by the tutors. We were all pretty confident about this image and had started preparations, but unfortunately the response from the tutors was pretty negative. We spent most of the rest of Thursday pretty down about the tutors response, we looked at some other images from the movie her which included these:







We liked that bottom one a lot, but I wasn't feeling like doing Her anymore. I went away and looked at screenshots of other films like Sunshine and Moon. But then we went and got some feedback from our peers and some 3rd years and they said that we should go ahead with one of our other Her ideas.



So we decided to go ahead with this shot, it has a lot of interesting colours and has a solid composition. We showed a couple of tutors too and they we're happy with the choice.



So that evening I made a whitebox for everyone to work from and I sent it out to everyone Friday morning so that everyone could start modelling. I assigned each colour here to a different member of the group, I worked on the green meshes. We set a target for finishing all of the meshes by Monday.

Sunday 5 October 2014

Week 1: Starting Second Year

After a painfully long summer it feels good to be thrown back into work. It's nice to see the course adapting to changes in the industry, it reassures me that I'm on the right course. Right off the bat we're now learning PBR, it isn't much harder than what I'm used to, and it makes more sense, trying to make things look metal is now super easy because of metalness maps, makes it so much easier.

We're also put into groups for this first project which as far as I know is new, it's really great to see how other people work and picking up techniques to use in my own work. For the project we made a Viking style room where we each worked on a portion of each asset, passing it to the next person when you're done.

For our room I concepted the barrel, modelled the table, unwrapped the bench, textured the hog, reviewed the shield and corrected the textures on the barrel. And also we all made small assets to further populate the space, I made the cutlery.

Everyone is strong in different areas, for instance I enjoy modelling in 3Ds max, but I struggle with texturing. But other members were much better at texturing and helped me out, and also I felt like I was helping the others in areas I am more comfortable with.



So this is how the scene ended up, I'm pretty happy with it, there's nothing that stands out as being terrible. It's in Unreal 4 in this image, I was the one who chucked it all in engine and arranged it, so I've managed to grasp the basics of the engine. I'm glad that the way you import and texture assets hasn't changed much since UDK, the software is just generally nicer to use with the exception of the occasional bugs which require "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" method to fix.