Unreal Project : Garage/ Blacksmith
For this task we had to create a 3D environment using software called Unreal Engine.
We had to choose our own groups to work with for this project. I had originally wanted to do the sci-fi city with: EJ, Rhys, Daniel and Jess for the project, but instead decided to work with Danielle, John, Michael, Rory and Najib on the Garage/ Blacksmith project. Here is a list of the briefs we could have chosen from:
- Haunted Mansion
- Dungeon
- Tavern
- Blacksmith
- Fairy Realm
- Sci-Fi City
- Ancient Temple
- Museum
- Garage
- Observatory
After some thought we decided to work on the Garage/ Blacksmith environment because we had a large base of ideas and a few old and new methods to approach the project. We began by setting up a mood board to get a general consensus for how the environment would hopefully look. Using google, we searched for images relating to dark fantasy/ real world blacksmith forges, as well as checking out related TV shows, movies, and games. Media products like Forged in Fire, WoW, Darksiders 2/3, and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Alongside looking at real life references of blacksmith forges, like the Hot Milk Forge in Northern Ireland.
Starting The Project:
Firstly I set up a basic discord server for the start of the project. This was our way of contacting each other in the most efficient way throughout the project, while also being able to share files, concept art, Maya objects and texturing that would be present in the environment that we would be creating.
Alongside that, Najib and I suggested from our experiences in the games dev course to set up a Trello Board that would help keep the group organized and know what they were doing.
Here is the link to our trello board:
https://trello.com/b/CQVDXoJz/blacksmith-environment-project
Finally, we decided to see what each of us would like to make our focal point of the project. In the end we decided to go by what we were best with at the time and made out a list so we could keep track on what everyone was doing:
- Danielle – Environment/ Texturing
- Ben – 3D Props and Texturing
- Rory – 3D Props and Texturing
- Michael – 3D Props and Texturing
- Najib – Environment/ Texturing
- John – Anvil/ Texturing
As you can see, I am the 3D Prop Artist and Texture as I can use Maya efficiently in different situations. This led us to begin creating thumbnail art for the initial environment scene.
After completing a few thumbnails, I wanted to increase the drawings depth and try to add colour to some of them. This let us see how different colours and light tones would affect our scene in the future. After finishing the colour mockups, it ended up looking better than expected and was a great help when we started to build the scene.
Concept art
For the concept art, I first began brainstorming some concept ideas for a few things that might be seen in most blacksmith forges as well as some Easter eggs from the games we had looked at. Mainly a Forge Hammer, and a few swords and spears became the bases of my ideas. Let’s start with the creation of the forge hammer.
Forge Hammer
For this design, I began by gathering reference images of forge hammers and blacksmith hammers by using both real life references and video game references as my starting point. I saved a lot of hammer images to my google drive creating an almost makeshift moodboard and then with them as my inspiration mixed and matched pieces of the hammers together to see what final outcomes may look like.
I decided to do a few examples of how the hammer could look as a finished product, and used the references on my google drive to create 4 different hammers.
- The first one at the top right was meant to be a very forward heavy hammer head, this would have made it easier for someone to get more powerful strikes but the control of their swings would be lessened. To portray this I wanted to create a simple handle attached to a thick metal head.
- The one in the middle, I decided to go all out on the dark fantasy theme and mixed in some Nordic inspirations to make this particular hammer. For its shape, I decided to use Thor’s hammer as its base, and made the hammer’s head more cuboidal as seen in dark fantasy games.
- The third hammer on the bottom right is based on a real life hammer. It’s simple design didn’t leave much room for imagination so I decided I definitely wasn’t doing that as a final design.
- The last one in the bottom left hand corner, I decided to design more like a mallet. This did really suit with the blacksmith theme as the mallet would be too comedically if it was made any bigger.
After finishing these 4 designs, I ended up choosing the second hammer design because it stood out as the most realistically accurate and dark fantasy appropriate design compared to the others ones.
Katana
For this design, I began by gathering reference images of katanas by using both real life references and video game references as my starting point. I saved a lot of katana images to my google drive creating an almost makeshift moodboard and then with them as my inspiration mixed and matched pieces of the katanas together to see what final outcomes may look like.
I decided to do a few examples of how the katana could look as a finished product, and used the references on my google drive to create 3 different katanas.
- The first one at the top was meant to be an original styled katana. A simplistic style that’s seen throughout history and in a lot of video games as well. The katana was never meant to have a flashy design and just be functional.
- The one in the middle, I decided to go all out on the dark fantasy theme and mixed in some inspiration from the Blade comic book film series to make this particular katana. For its shape, I decided to use a basic carbon katana as its base, and made the hilt sharp and edgy as seen in the blade films.
- The last one at the bottom, I decided to design incorporating a bit of both the first and second designs. This created a simplistic design with a slightly edgy looking hilt.
After finishing these 3 designs, I ended up choosing the first katana design because its simplistic style still fitted in perfectly with the dark fantasy theme.
Spear
For this design, I began by gathering reference images of spears and halberds by using both real life references and video game references as my starting point. I saved a lot of these images to my google drive creating an almost makeshift moodboard and then with them as my inspiration mixed and matched pieces of the spears and halberds together to see what final outcomes may look like.
I decided to do a few examples of how the spear could look as a finished product, and used the references on my google drive to create 3 different hammers.
- The first one on the left, I decided to go with a dark fantasy theme by adding a destroyed rag around the head of the spear.
- The middle design is based on a real life Persian era spear. It’s simple design didn’t leave much room for imagination but already looked like it was from a fantasy game instead of real life so I decided not to rule it out right away.
- The last design on the right, I decided to incorporate designs from the halberd references on the google drive. This design wasn’t really feeling right when I imagined putting it in the scene so I decided it wasn’t a good idea to continue with its design.
After finishing these 3 designs, I ended up choosing the second spear design because it stood out as the most realistic and worked best in the dark fantasy designed environment.
Texturing
Texturing the objects
The first thing that I needed to do was export the fbx file from Maya and import it into Adobe Substance 3D Painter. Before importing my models I had to check that everything worked and that all the objects had been UV’d correctly. I was now ready to start texturing.
Forge Hammer
Master Sword
Katana
Forge Tongs
Spear
Unreal Set Up/ Final Movie Outcome
Setting Up Unreal
Lets just say right from the start Unreal was extremely temperamental. When I opened my project initially the project would say it was compiling 20000 textures and crashing the computer. I then decided that it was a problem with my laptop not being powerful enough to run the unreal software, so I decided I’d try again on the university windows computers. This time the problem that occurred was I needed admin access to the software or it would keep crashing again. This had to be my worst start to a project ever but I finally started to get the software working on the MAC computers using an older version of unreal. This came with its own fair share of issues. To start with as it was an older version of the software a lot of the class tutorials on unreal didn’t work on the older version making it harder to relearn the software in such a short space of time. The MAC’s other main concern was that the map wasn’t building the lighting correctly, stopping me from continuing with the recording part of the project. I contacted Henry about the first few problems, so moving to the MAC’s was the best possible solution at the time. However, the rebuilding errors on the MAC’s meant I had to export the file back to the windows pc’s and fix the problem myself. Even though both the tutors and YouTube videos tried to help fix the lighting error nothing was working. I had found out by myself through trial and error that when I was creating a new level on the old software, it hadn’t created the level properly meaning that my level was considered a ghost level, this meant that even though the objects were visible in the environment/ scene the unreal software was read that none of the Objects, Textures, Lights, or Cameras were actually in the scene. In this instance what I needed to do was to make an entirely new level and do an imported duplication of the original level to finally fix the extremely annoying lighting errors.
Materials and Textures
To get the textures to work in unreal, I had to connect the nodes of each individual channel of a texture by dragging the material into the node setup window, this would then allow me to connect the nodes to the main texture node. To connect each material to the correct corresponding nodes I had to look out for the RGB section of the main texture node and connect the Base colour node to it. I then had to repeat this process for the normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion materials.
Now that I got the texturing figured out, it was time to paste the textures on the objects and buildings in the environment. Since there wasn’t a texture among the environment files another member of the group created I had to work out a way to make a quick alternative that still functioned with the blacksmith theme. I settled for a marble counter surface on substance painter with the addition of adding a dark fill layer to darken the wall’s tone and an inverted mask to the marble texture so the cracks were now white and the wall itself was stone gray. I decided that I also wanted to change Danielle’s lamp texture slightly to make it an emissive lighting texture. This process did not take too long, leaving the finished results to be a perfect turquoise blue lamp texture with the qualities of a normal light in the scene.
After finishing with that, I quickly got to work both creating and reassembling the materials for the objects as well as organizing all the textures and materials in the correct project files.
It slowly began to take the shape of a blacksmith forge as I added the anvil, furnace, and other objects to the scene. As I was finishing adding the final objects to the scene, I decided to start working on the lights in the scene. I started by selecting the sky light and decided to change the lights direction and colour so the scene’s environment would look like it was in the middle of a sunrise. Next I added spotlights to the scene one by the window again to increase the visibility in the room, I did the same by putting the other one by the door. Finally I recoloured a box light to an orangey and yellow colour and placed it in the furnace to give off the effect that the fire was lit and burning. This gave the scene more immersion and the orange glow from the furnace fit the scene perfectly.
Filming
The last thing I needed to do was start shots for the video. To do this, I had to go onto the Cinematic section and select the add level sequence. I chose to save it to my cinematics folder. Next I created a camera using the shortcuts panel on the left side of the screen, and dragged it into my level sequencer named Shot_01. I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to move the camera and record it on the sequencer’s timeline in a smooth cinematic way. For the first shot the camera made a simple pan of the furnace, this meant that the recorded points one the timeline were a simple start and end point. This wasn’t the case for some of the other shots though. For the shots of the anvil and walking through the door multiple points were added to the timeline in addition to the start and end points. This was because the camera movements for these shots were more complex and needed definite detail to look correct in the final render. After testing the shots I add a fade effect to the start and end of each shot so that when placed altogether it would have an even cinematic flow.
Finally after finishing all the shots, I went back to my cinematic folder and created another new level sequencer named Master Sequence. The master sequence was used to bring all the shots together into one fluid video. At this point of the process I also added a music file of ambient blacksmith sounds. And then rendered it as a finalized video file.
Link to Cinematic video tutorial: https://youtu.be/-NmHXAFX-3M
End of the Project
Conclusion
To conclude, I feel I worked to the best of my ability with this project. Even though I was frustrated with the software and some of the textures not working properly during the project, I still believe I managed to finish this project to a quality and standard I was satisfied with. I’m ecstatic with how the blacksmith environment turned out. It gives off the warm working environments of a blacksmiths workshop, bringing to life how I envisioned a blacksmiths to look. One thing I would point out to myself is that in future I need to manage my time better, even though the software not working wasn’t my fault, if I had started earlier I might have been able to come across the problem sooner and have been able to solve it quicker. In saying all that said I am now really looking forward to semester two and hope from the experiences gained from this semester the next one will go a lot better. Finally I will try to take more pride in my work I create instead of looking at everything negatively. This project has shown me my true strengths and that I should be proud of the work that I have created.