Initially I had exported the textures as PBR metallic roughness, a texture set that included base colour, metallic, roughness, normal, and height. When applying these textures in Unreal, a lot of the textures looked weirdly wet and reflective, like they were covered in oil. I asked my group members about this and they figured out it was because the textures needed to be exported as Unreal engine 4 packed. This texture set included base colour, normal, and occlusionroughnessmetallic (the three attributes merged into one texture).

 

In Unreal I created two folders in the content browser – a 3DAssets folder and a Textures folder. I imported my assets to the appropriate folders, then dragged a fbx model into the scene. I double clicked on the occlusionroughnessmetallic textures to open the menu and made sure to uncheck sRGB. When clicking on the model I was able to see its material on the side bar. I double clicked on the material to open the material editor, and from there I dragged the model’s texture set into the editor. I plugged the textures into the appropriate places – the basecolour to basecolour, normal to normal, and for the occlusionroughnessmetallic I had to plug the RGB into each node separately. The red channel went to ambient occlusion, the green channel went to roughness, and the blue channel went to metallic. It was easy to remember since the name of the file showed which place in the RGB channels each aspect took.

I repeated this process with each 3D asset, dragging them into the scene and applying the textures. Once that was done I began constructing the modular buildings. Harry’s modular building took quite a bit of time to put together since it had so many different pieces; I began with the bottom floor, adding the door first then alternating between panels with and without windows all the way around to create a rectangular wall. For the next floor I did the same, but excluded the door and swapped the pattern of windows, so that a window on the bottom floor would have a blank wall above it and vice versa. The next floor up was the same, swapping the pattern back again to create alternating layers of windows up the building’s length. Once floors 2 and 3 were done I was able to copy and paste them and stack the copies on top of eachother to add more height to the building. When I was happy with the height, I added the top layer with the ridge around the roof, making sure the pattern of windows was opposite to the penultimate floor. The modular building didn’t include a roof, so I covered the empty space with a plane and textured it with a dark texture from Unreal’s starter content. I looked around the building and adjusted any panels that were misplaced before moving onto the next buildings.

Rhys’ modular building was very easy to construct since it only had 3 parts, and even then I didn’t end up using one of those parts. I added the bottom layer with the door, then layered midsections on top of that to make a tall building. The main thing to keep in mind with this building was that the doors and doorhandles weren’t merged with the main building, so they’d have to be selected separately for translation, rotation, and scaling. The cat café was also very easy to add since it only had two parts, the café and the canopy. Adding the props was similar, but the trashcan was also in 3 separate parts so I had to be careful when moving it. 

 

Our group had all been dealing with some quite serious personal problems, which meant we lost a lot of time on the project. Thankfully our tutor gave us an extension and was patient with us, but our productivity still took a big hit. Communications in the group broke up a bit too; one member had seemingly dropped out of the project at an earlier stage without warning, and other members were no longer talking to each other. I was dealing with some real life issues too, so I found it hard to stay in contact. Eventually we got back to work at different speeds, and to make up for lost time we were advised to use premade assets from the Unreal store.

 

The store allows artists to sell assets for others to use in their projects, and also includes a section with free-to-use assets. I looked in the free section for a while and found two packs that I thought could be useful: a spaceship interior pack and a downtown city pack. I took a while to download these and add them to my project, although I had to clear some space on my laptop to do so. When the packs were added, I was able to use all the assets included much the same as I used my group’s assets (although thankfully the textures were pre-applied). 

 

Dan had textured a set of road pieces, but the colours didn’t exactly match up and I didn’t want to give him more work to do at this point, so I looked at my other assets to see what I could use instead. I experimented with a few different options, but eventually decided to use planes for the whole floor with a spaceship interior texture for the pedestrian area and a glowing hexagonal pattern for the road. I also added a kerb with another texture from the spaceship set. I played around with the sizing of the different parts until I was happy with how it looked, and moved my buildings to be adjacent to the road. I only planned to lay out one side of a street instead of a full city, that way I could save time and focus on the little details. As long as I was careful with my camerawork it wouldn’t look too odd.

I was worried that my assets and scene in general looked too much like a plain city scene and not futuristic enough to fit the brief, so I started adding some more futuristic touches. I mainly did this with emissive textures as they can emulate neon lighting. I followed a tutorial step by step to create a base emissive texture and make instances of it for different colour options. To make the emissive texture I created a constant and converted it to a parameter for the emission, then created a vector 3 constant and converted it to a parameter for the colour. I then created a multiply node, plugged colour into A and emission into B, then plugged that multiply node into emissive colour. With this basic texture I was able to create instances where I could edit the colour and amount of emission. I made a blue variation and a pink variation, which fit with our overall blue-purple-pink colour scheme. From there I could apply these textures to objects and select “use emissive as static lighting” from the lighting menu to turn any object into a light source. When I rebuilt the lighting, I was able to see the new light source work.

 

I tried for a while to make emissive textures from pre-existing PNGs – for example I wanted to make my poster designs glow by adding emission – but I couldn’t figure out how to do this and instead opted to use emissive objects to frame the posters. The posters themselves wouldn’t be light sources like I initially planned, but I could use planes and some of the frames from the spaceship pack to have light sources directly surrounding the posters.

To make the most of the emissive textures and to fit with the nightlife vibe, I wanted to set the scene at night. I wasn’t sure how to do this, so Rhys and I got on a call and he explained it to me (I also explained how to do emissive textures to him, we helped each other a lot at this phase of the project). He told me to click on the sky sphere and edit the attributes from the side panel, dimming the sun’s light and altering its position in the sky. I also gave the sky a dark purple colour with pink clouds to fit the colour scheme and add an otherworldly vibe. I edited the skylight too and rebuilt the lighting, making changes until I got the atmosphere I was looking for. The scene looked very dark at this point, but I knew it’d look good once all my lighting was in place.

I also used the emissive textures to create paths around the city. I used a plane with an emissive texture applied for the base, then added a grate from one of the Unreal store packs over the top to create a grid-like pattern. The grate was added to make the design more detailed and to avoid the lighting being too intense or blinding. I copied those two assets and used them as tiles to build pathways.

Next I began adding detail to the cat café. It was one of the areas I’d chosen to focus on in my video, so I spent a bit of time making it look good. I used the downtown asset pack to add tables and chairs to the balcony, then moved the chairs about a bit to give a “lived-in” look to the scene. I also used umbrellas from the same asset pack, and some small props like condiment bottles and pretzels. I scattered the props across the table to look like they’d been used. The asset pack included different colour variations of a lot of the textures, so I looked through my options and chose blue and white for the table setup. I copied the tables and chairs and placed a copy underneath the canopy too, moving the copied chairs again so the two seating areas wouldn’t be identical. I also deleted the umbrellas from this version since the area was already covered. For more detail I added some vending machines (one by the door and one on the balcony) along with some signs. I used one of my own poster designs applied to a plane with an emissive plane behind it for a light source, and also added some of the signs that came with the downtown pack. Most of the Unity store assets had multiple materials, so I was able to add an emissive element to them without making the whole object one colour. A lot of the assets from the downtown pack didn’t have the futuristic twist I needed, but adding an emissive texture to part of the model was the perfect touch.

The next area I wanted to focus on was the rooftops of Rhys’ buildings. I had placed two iterations of it beside each other (one a little taller) and decided to connect them with a bridge from the downtown pack to give the feeling of an advanced city that was running out of space on the ground and had resorted to building on rooftops. My original idea was to create a super crowded scene like that, but I couldn’t due to time and technology restraints (I’d been working from my laptop). Still, I wanted to include a bridge between buildings anyway. I copied the door from the ground floor to show where the bridge led to, and added lampposts from the downtown pack to the other end of the bridge so it wouldn’t be floating. I began to decorate the rooftop at that end of the bridge to look like people would be up there, adding chairs along one edge and a fountain as the centrepiece (both from the downtown pack). I also added a plane with one of the spaceship interior textures to the rooftop to give a bit of variation on the ground. To make the scene feel more futuristic and interesting, I added an emissive texture to the undersides of the fountain’s layers. I got the idea for this from the vaporwave trend that was popular online a few years back which incorporated a lot of neon lights, blue and pink tones, and images of Greek statues. Finally I added railings around both rooftops using a fence asset from the spaceship pack and made parts of it emissive, one part blue and one part pink.

Dan and I had made some graffiti decals to add to the buildings, I originally planned to add them to the base colour textures in Krita but Henry showed me a more convenient way. He showed me how to make a decal by importing a transparent image and creating a material from it, plugging the alpha channel into opacity, then changing the material domain to deferred decal and the blend mode to translucent. After this I was able to drag my decal onto my scene and manipulate the box around it to choose where it would be projected. I did this for the two pieces of graffiti I made, and I showed Rhys how to do this too. I added a few instances of the graffiti in the scene, mainly on the side of the hexagonal building where there was an empty space.

Before moving on to filming my shots, I looked for mistakes like misplaced objects and z-fighting. There was a bit of z-fighting with the planes especially, so I took some time to fix that before rebuilding my lighting one last time and preparing my cameras.