For setting up my scene, I needed to first rig my character.
Thankfully I didn’t have anything too complex like fingers to take care of, so honestly automatic weights ended up working decently well.
At least, after I fixed the issue of the armature not working correctly.
This video helped me with troubleshooting and it turned out that I needed to merge some vertices together, and afterwards it was working well.
Well, mostly. I still had to do some weight painting and adjust things here and there.
I also noticed that the teeth of my model had formed triangles here and there, but thankfully it wasn’t a big issue as the topology would triangulate when importing into unreal anyway.
I did find it kind of a shame during the weight process that it wasn’t possible to have object mode on one side of the screen and weight painting in another, but I still managed to figure things out.
I found that instead, enabling the wireframe helped me with perceiving the distortions when posing my model.
Having a character has jelly limbs definitely sped up the process significantly, as Blender mostly applied automatic weights to my character very well.
… Mostly.
I couldn’t really figure out how to prevent the teeth and tongue of my character from just fully moving out of place when moving the head, and I’m fortunate enough that I simply didn’t need that much of a head tilt for the pose I had in mind.
So I just left it and continued on.
I applied a pretty basic armature for the fish, but…
… it actually also ended up working very well with automatic weights! I was really pleased with how easily I was able to adjust the poses and move the fish into different poses that actually looked nice and natural.
As for actually setting up the scene, I had done a few concept sketches before for how I wanted to set up the scene…
But I decided to create one more…
It was still very rough, but it helped give me a starting point, at least.
Other than just a few issues at the start…
… I did really enjoy setting up the scene for my character and adding all the different poses for the fish.
Although I had set up my character horizontally, I did decide to pose him a little more vertically. I found the idea of him showing the fish the way to go really cute and it was a really nice experience finally putting everything together like this.
I wasn’t able to use symmetry in sculpting anymore, I think because of the vertices merging earlier, however I was able to adjust my character’s expression to be really happy, which I think make him feel more cartoony as well as more friendly.
It helped me a lot to set up a camera scene at the side to better see which aspects of my character and the different fish you would be seeing.
I chose this pose for the Sea Dragon as it came off half like a creature, and half sort of anthropomorphised, like he was pointing towards the way he was swimming and showing the fish the wonders of the deep sea.
Now, using Unreal was initially a big struggle for me as I was so unfamiliar with the program, but after studying it a bit (and receiving some help from Chloe, she was a massive help in helping me better understand the program), I slowly but surely was able to set up my scene.
I found this underwater blueprint (video below), but the link wasn’t working so I ended up finding and using the updated version: https://lynkolight.gumroad.com/l/fabiz
This blueprint helped me immensely in terms of setting up my scene, as it set lighting and fogginess, some of which I could adjust and some of which I couldn’t
Sadly, the opacity for my character wasn’t working properly. I did try different material settings to fix this issue, but none of them worked and instead just made my model look weird and see-through like this.
I’m glad I still liked how it looked without the transparency, but it’s just a shame especially since I really did like how it looked.
And again, sadly I wasn’t able to change the lighting exactly to my liking. Some parameters simply wouldn’t let me change them, so I had to make do and adjust what I could.
Sculpting in the environment was actually pretty fun, other than when my materials weren’t working…
I downloaded some free assets from Quixel Bridge, but the “add” button wasn’t working and almost every time I had to actually create a material for the assets, plug in all the textures, create an instance and apply that. Sadly, when trying to create some “foliage” in my scene, for example rocks, pebbles or seaweed, the textures wouldn’t work at all. I sadly wasn’t able to fully explore the solutions for this as I was behind and simply did not have the time, but I am still curious as to what was possibly causing this.
Nevertheless, I slowly but surely set up what I could.
I followed this tutorial in order to create some bubbles in my scene which I think added a lot of personality to the scene!
I really liked how these bubbles ended up looking and it was fun to set all of them up.
I kept adding elements to my scene with the time I had, such as a marble statue head or a treasure chest in the background. Also, adding some big rocks in the background not only created a bit more contrast before my blue creature and its blue environment, but also made the scene feel more like it was an actual place, which was really cool!
And, as I mentioned before, sadly I had an issue with the fish texturing.
I had completed the texturing on one fish’s UV map, but I had made it a 1k texture instead of 2k. So I attempted to fix the issue, but in Blender I realised that my other fish’s UV maps actually looked a bit different. I attempted to copy and paste the UVs, but for whatever reason it just wasn’t working for me.
So, after trying to see if applying some other textures to my fish might work, and them not looking very good, I decided that I would simply add some colour materials to add at least something to them. Funnily enough, I actually ended up really liking how this looked. Although it was a huge shame to me that they couldn’t be more detailed, there was a certain charm to this look, and the colours and simplicity of it actually reminded me of that sort of “storybook”, wholesome element that I was aiming for.
Finally, here are the high quality screenshots I took of my character in this environment.
There could definitely be other elements that could have been added if it wasn’t for my technical complications and time management, however all things considered I do think these scene do look appealing and convey my character’s personality, environment and story decently well, as well as showing off his design.
In terms of post production, which I sadly wasn’t able to complete, I would have liked to make the scene a little darker, emphasise the glow in my character and draw in some seaweed for example.
Using Unreal Engine was definitely a learning experience for me and the technical difficulties did make things a little frustrating for me, however overall it was really interesting using this program, learning how it works and having that experience of setting up a scene in it. Having my character that I had worked so hard on finally be in a such a realistic looking scene like this, in an underwater environment surrounded by fish friends – there was something really charming and fun to it that I genuinely did enjoy.