Ideas
For this group project, we were tasked with creating a Cinematic Short Film. Out of the 10 themes we were given, the Ancient Temple had the most votes within my group. We came up with our own original idea of a Church/Cathedral that was built in our present but was destroyed in the future due to a natural disaster.
We made a list of assets and thought about our favourite styles for the assignment. We all agreed on a comic book style inspired by Telltale games such as The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us and Spiderman into the Spiderverse. We later started creating our assets based completely on Telltale rather than into the Spiderverse. As The Walking Dead is one of my favourite games, I was very familiar with this style.
We used a miro board for our shared ideas and references.
Ancient Temple, Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration (miro.com)
Block out
For my block out, I took inspiration from my churches in Greyabbey and St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast. I added assets which we previously discussed such as an altar, first aid kits, bibles, and phones.
Modelling and Texturing Assets
Creating our block outs gave us a better idea of what assets we would need. We split them up so each person would have 4-6 assets, depending on the difficulty of the model. I chose to model the ceiling, a chandelier, a cross and a skull.
When modelling my assets, I kept in mind how I wanted my scene to look. I had originally thought about a tsunami destroying my temple; however, The Walking Dead, which was my main inspiration for my scene, doesn’t have any underwater scenes. I decided an earthquake would be the natural disaster that destroys my temple.
I created my crosses with cracks throughout the wooden planks so they could be displayed in a scene as if they were unharmed or destroyed in an earthquake. By using the multi-cut tool and bevelling the edges, I created one inspired by these references and added a gold ring for those who wanted a grander cathedral. To keep to the walking dead theme, I added a slight purple hue to the wood and used a blur scope filter to keep the textures quite flat. Previously, I did use a height map for more detailed wood and anchored green fill layer to them to give the illusion of moss growing in the cracks, however, it didn’t fit the theme or the other assets, so I chose to use a blur scope instead when adding the moss.
Learning Substance: Professional Tips and Tricks (80.lv)
The chandelier was quite time consuming as there were many angles involved to keep the circular shape of the tiers even. The most challenging part was using MASH to create the chain links used to hang the chandelier from the ceiling. I created a single chain link then used MASH to duplicate the link to my desired length and rotate every second link, so they look connected. I then created a smaller link to connect each tier to the one above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIqZKh0lWkw
As for texturing, I wanted to make the chandelier gold as the gold in the chandelier would go well with the ring in the cross. I felt the pure gold texture was too bright in substance painter, so I turned down the opacity of the layer and added a steel layer below the gold to make the gold look worn down. I added an emissive layer during texturing to get an idea of how the chandelier would look turned on if anyone wanted to add lights in their scene, but later hid they layer for exporting textures. I also made the material around the lights resemble glass. As glass looks different throughout The Walking Dead, sometimes being white and other times transparent, I added glass so I could later change my mind when applying my textures in Unreal Engine. For the broken chandelier, I used the same textures as the hanging chandelier, but added cracks to the glass to make it look like some of them hit the ground when they fell.
I had a little trouble with the ceiling in the beginning. I originally planned to bake the texture of the planks onto a plane in substance painter. However, I couldn’t achieve the level of detail I was looking for by doing this. I then decided to make single planks so I could extrude the tops of the broken planks as far as I wanted. If I could go back and do it again, I would bake the whole planks onto a plane and make a tilable texture as I feel it would have been a little easier to build in unreal engine.
I made the metal of these planks less reflective than the chandelier as there weren’t any shiny metallic materials in The Walking Dead. I kept to a blue shade for the metal too keep with the purple/blue colour palette many of us liked in The Walking Dead.
Original Planks
Final Planks
When texturing the structure of the ceiling, I found a MatFX Comic Book filter in substance which gave the Telltale black ink edges to my asset. I went back and applied it to my previous assets, but I ended up not using the filter on the ceiling planks or chandelier as they weren’t very noticeable fur to the thin mesh of the chandelier and dark hue of the planks.
I was familiar with the process of modelling a skull from semester 2 of last year as 2 of my assessments involved skulls. Because of this, I wanted to sculpt another one as I felt that since my first skull, my skills have improved a great deal. I used my first skull model as the base for this model and sculpted using blender. I also have a physical skull model that I used as a reference and research the different types of teeth as the teeth on my skull model wasn’t very accurate. I retopologized the skull and baked the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh in substance painter to keep the grooves around the mouth.
I used my knowledge from last year when texturing by using the wax candle smart material for the base of the skull. I changed the base colour of the smart material to make it less saturated like the zombies in The Walking Dead. I originally added my own black ink lines as, after I imported my skull into unreal engine and used Cloe’s shader, I felt my skull needed more outlines around the eyes and teeth. However, after finding the MatFX Comic Book filter, I decided to use it instead.
Importing assets and Building scene in Unreal Engine 5
I had trouble with sizing when importing our assets to unreal engine. To make sure our assets were imported their true size, I had to tick convert scene unit before importing so my scene wasn’t too small for lighting later. I felt the height of the walls were a little short for my temple, so I scaled them to 1.5 rather than 2 and used two walls to make the total height 3. I also used one of the walls as a ceiling for my alcove section so I would have a place for the statues and pillars rather than have them in the main body of the temple.
I had to do a little bit of adjusting when everything was imported and textured as some assets were out of proportion, such as the doors. I imported a human model from Maya to help with making sure everything was to scale.
Texturing
I found that a few of the assets, including a couple of my own, were quite shiny due to the metallic map. By not connecting the blue port to the metallic port on the result node of the material, the assets look much flatter, like the textures in The Walking Dead. I also had to turn up the saturation on a couple of the textures as without the metallic map the colours were very desaturated. I also added decals such as moss on the walls to go with the rain I added later on in my scene, and dried blood with a bullet next to the skull lying beside a gun.
Shader
I used Cloe’s shader to outline our assets in case there were inconsistencies with the graphic lines in our textures. To apply it, downloaded Cloe’s post process file and imported it into my unreal content folder. I created a post process volume and under Array in the Post Process Materials drop down, added the shader material. To alter the look of the shader, I clicked on the PPI_OutlineShader and changed the thickness and threshold of the instance.
(107) [Unreal Engine] – How To Add Post Process Material – YouTube
Sky sphere and rain
For my sky sphere, I downloaded BP_GoodSky from the Unreal Engine marketplace, which allowed me to change the lighting and weather conditions to fit my scene. I wanted the mood of my scene to feel sad and lonely. I achieved this by using the midnight storm Sky Preset which has a blue sky with lightning, and I created my own rain my following a YouTube tutorial. I used the Niagara system UE4 to create the rain particles, increased their spawn rate, added velocity and downloaded a water splash png to create the illusion the rain was hitting the ground.
Lighting
For my lighting, I researched sad scenes in famous movie and found that low lighting with cool tones is the most popular way to convey a sad and distressing scene. The first lights I added were flickering lights in my chandelier. As the temple was destroyed, I knew it couldn’t be completely lit, however, as it was still connected to the ceiling, I wanted slight flickers to make the chandelier a focal point.
I found it difficult to light my scene as there was very little light streaming in from the direct light source. I added a PostProcessVolume and increased the exposure, so my shadows weren’t as intense. Cloe taught me how to also use a PostProcessVolume to add a blue hue to my scene to keep with the sad mood I was trying to convey. I wanted to show light streaming through the windows, however, having the light pointing away from the windows wasn’t noticeable. I then used 2 rectangular lights for each window and placed them facing towards the windows, so they looked like the source of light.
The corners where I had placed the skulls were still very dark after increasing the exposure. To give them a more natural light source, I added a point light over a white cone and placed them both on top of a candle. I originally tried to make the cones emissive by Connecting RGB to emissive colour, however, there wasn’t enough light coming from the candles that way. This was, I was able to have full control over how bright the candle was.
Cameras
I knew a little about cameras before this assignment as I did photography throughout Art a level. As an unreal camera has the same settings as a physical camera, I found them a little easier to navigate. I use a 30mm Prime f/1.4 lens on nearly all my cameras but reduced the max focal length for my 3rd shot so I could capture more of my surroundings along the ground. I enjoyed experimenting with cameras as photography is still something I enjoy doing in my spare time.
Shots
I found using level sequences enjoyable as they were similar to adding keyframes in maya. As the ground was the busiest place in my scene, I enjoyed experimenting with low level shots to emphasise the rubble and destruction of the temple. The ground is where the broken chandelier, rubble and cross lies due to the earthquake, but there are also skulls that tell their own story, so it is up to the interpretation of the viewer as to what the story is here.
Rendering
When doing my render tests, I had an issue with the rendered images. The first few pngs were completely black, then every image after was blank. This happened to a few more people in the course, including Cloe. She told me how to resolve the problem by first going to window, then levels, then changing the default streaming method from blueprint to always loaded. Then I had to make sure my shot was being filmed from my main level. None of these seemed to affect the pngs as when I did another render test, the images looked the same. After I changed to rendering as jpegs, the shot rendered as normal. For all my tests after this I used jpegs so I wouldn’t fall behind with my rendering.
After I did 5 render tests, I began rendering my shots as exr files. I turned on Anti-Aliasing to smooth jagged edges and increased the temporal sample count to 32, creating an even smoother image. I then added console variables and began rendering. Once the files were imported to After effects, I added a black solid layer to fade in and out of my scene. I also recorded 1 minute of rainfall audio from YouTube rather than importing music as I felt it kept to the mood of my film.
References throughout project
