This is the Unreal Section of the project. Now, I know that this isn’t week 12, however, I simply made to keep the format a lot more simpler when it is viewed for assessment. This project was originally going to be submited by 22nd of December. However, due to unfortunate events, our group got an extension.
Without further do, lets go and talk about the end process of the task.
Final Push
It did not start well. When I opened my map and went I and tried to add textures to the road, by dragging the material onto the object of my choosing, it instead broke and textured every single road. So, I called my classmate for help alongside asking her for a few tips on how to fix this problem. This ended up helping. However as I began to look at the map, I began to dislike it a lot more. So, I scrapped the original map and decided to create a whole new map. After creating a new blank unreal folder, I immediately went to work to get ground put together alongside some of the roads. To get the textures to work in unreal, I had to connect the nodes of each individual channel of a texture by double clicking onto the material (which looks like a ball in the content tab. This will open a window which will allow me to connect the nodes to the many body. To connect them I had first to figure out which of the textures corespondent to the right nodes. For example the Base Colour of a texture had to connect to the base colour of the main bod. The same can be said about the others as well. To connect them, I had to click and drag from the RGB section of the texture to the Body of the texture. For the Occlusion Roughness and Metallic texture, I had to go with a bit of a different way. Firstly I had to double click on that image and disable the RGBs in the new pop up window. Afterwards, I connected the R to the Ambient Occlusion, G to Roughness and B to Metallic to give a better effect to the texture. Trying to connect this texture to just the ambient occlusion, causes it to give of a wet like texture. This process is repeated on every object in this world.
Now that I got the things figured out, It was time to paste in the buildings. Since I wanted to try and add some variety to the buildings, I went quickly into Substance Painter and created a simple second skin for the building by changing the colour of the building base alongside adding some graffiti as stamps by clicking the plus button in the brush section at the bottom left of the screen. This brings up a menu where I can bring in the textures. Once done, All I have to click on is import. With that done, the assets are simply dragged onto the model. Once the second texture was done, it was imported into unreal where I discovered the second problem. As I wanted to put texture on the second store building, instead of actually just pasting onto that building exclusively, it also pasted onto the second building. However, it had a quick simple fix. Which was to create a new material by right clicking onto the content folder and selecting material. This would create a new material and allow me to make versions of different building. The simple reason this happen is that the building both shared the same name for the sections of where the textures have to go.
With that done, I quickly got to work and created both reassembling the materials for the objects alongside pasting the objects inside the project. Here are some progress of the city being slowly build. While making a city, I had to consider how to make the place look dense and pack like how city are usually in real life, using a small area. The solution was to us the modular buildings that Rhys and Harry did and to paste them past other buildings to give it a sense that people could be living here, and also to give the vibe of it being a massive town. Here some photos to show the progress of the town.
It slowly began to look like a city as I added more building. As I was adding more, I decided to start working onto the lights of the scene. To do that, I first selected the sky dome and clicked onto the tab on the right to change the colour of the sky which brings up a pop up window. With it I changed it to a purple looking atmosphere to get close to the concept are that I created. Now, to match the sky, I also did the same with the direct lighting the scene. I of course tried to mess with the settings until I got the result that I wanted.
As the buildings were being placed, the streets felt empty. Seeing that we were close to the deadline, our tutors allowed us to use unreal engine assets from the marketplace and used this pack which looked good enough to fit in my scene as it gave off the feeling of Sci Fi and had some assets that can be repurposed as cyberpunk. Once, I hit download, I immediately put the pack into the program and put in the items. I used some of the pipe models as wires for electricity connecting to the buildings to give it a feeling of a cyberpunk city.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/spaceship-interior-environment-set?sessionInvalidated=true
The last thing that was left was to start creating the shots for the video. To do that, I firstly went onto the Cinematic and selected add image sequence. This will pop up the menu of where to save this. Once, I chose where to save it, I clicked on create. Then created the camera using the panel on the left side of the screen. Once the camera is created, it is then dragged onto the timeline. With this, it turns the timeline it one that is similar to After Effects. To make the camera move, I had to press onto the plus icon to create a key frame. Then move the camera to where I want the animation to go alongside moving the red marker to the end and clicked onto the plus icon to create another frame. I did this about 9 times. As you see in the video, in some of the shots, there was blur in them. This is because I messed around with the aperture to try and get the desired effect. The aperture was also animated using the same process as the camera. To render the shots, I firstly had to go onto the timeline tab. Then click on the clip board . This pop up a new window just to select which scene i need to render. I first did a test to see how it looks. With this however, I discovered that I needed to change the building as they had physics attached to them as they began shaking violently and flying out. This was a simple fix as I had to disable the skeletal mesh when importing the item.
When the renders were done, they were then put into After Effects by importing the image sequence of each shot in. Then put onto the timeline and merged together. Lastly, I needed some music. So, I grabbed the closest thing that sounds like cyberpunk music, downloaded the mp3, pasted in the song and exported the video.
Conclusion
Overall, I feel like I did the best I could do with this task. While I am not very with some of the progress that I did, I still think that I manage to finish this project quite well. I love how the city looks, giving the feeling of being dense and fitting in my creative vision. The bad about it is that I was less organised with this project alongside comparing myself to others instead of comparing my old work and seeing where it can go from there. With all that said I am still optimistic that second semester is going to be better. I have taken precautions to improve my mental health and to find out what is wrong with. I will also try to improve my skills by trying to gather more reference alongside using information from additional resources like books and videos to be used in my blogs to greater power. Lastly I will try to not underestimate both my ability as an artist and also to try and not underestimate how long will my task take to complete rather than waiting and finishing them around the time the task has to be submitted for the deadling.