Animation Strategies – Assignment 1 – 3D Group Environment “Ancient Temple”

When our group was finally formed, we immediately laid out the environment options, the potential each had and what style could we achieve.

A few of us had made a cute type style project before and were advised to go for something new. I had always wanted to try the Telltale/comic book type style and the whole team were very enthusiastic, referencing mainly Into the Spiderverse and popular Telltale games like The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead Game.

In the end we ended up with “Ancient Temple” with a slight twist, we decided on a present day church ruined by future natural disasters. We all had different ideas for what type of natural disaster. I personally wanted earthquake type broken flooring, and because of that I volunteered to create it as well as regular flooring.

We started creating a reference board to help us visualise what direction we would go for, and also for us to pin point what are the assets that would get our idea across.

From then we started some block outs/concepts of our scene. At first I was aiming for a shape of church that was reminiscent of a cross, as some churches follow this religious shape. We started looking into what kind of church was for us, we went through small American chapels to grand cathedrals. We went for a more local style, combining different aspects. This assignment I mainly used Unreal’s starter content for block out and layout concepts. I didn’t do many concepts for assets because what we were creating there was many references from real life and in the games we were inspired by.

Once we all agreed what assets were going to be included and what general layout of the church was going to be, we held a meeting where I asked everyone what kind of assets they would be comfortable making, and trying to include one or two for everyone that would be new or challenging.

My assets originally were – Broken/plain Floors, First Aid box, Rubble, Bedding and Plants

I ended up doing Broken/plain Floors, First Aid box, MRE rations, a Map, Starfish, Seaweed/Grass foliage and the Unreal Outliner shader.

We originally assigned 3D and 2D majority roles, but as time had went past we were content with what work we had set for ourselves. It also meant in the end everyone would have about the same amount of work. When I look back though I do wish I had the idea that one person would be dealing with all the modular structural pieces to have a more cohesive look, but in the end I think that would have felt a bit unfair to that person.

With the assets and roles assigned we started working on the asset development. Pretty early on though we were shown some things that the node based system can do in Unreal, so I researched ways to create an outliner shader so that we could have consistency in our environment, and I wanted to try something a bit challenging. I admit I didn’t fully understand the entirety of what was being explained, but it was my first time making anything like this and I could feel an improvement and comfortability because of the practice and things I did catch, which I then helped my team with later. There is a lot to the shader node system, so I will include some pictures as well as the video I found and used.

Prop and environmental asset creation was really enjoyable for me this assignment, I used my skillset that I developed from the previous year and I was determined to learn new techniques and tools for this assignment. Some props were easy like the first aid kit, map and rations. The rubble and floor required much more research and time to develop it.

FIRST AID KIT, MRE RATIONS & MAP

These assets were the easiest to create and didn’t require much extra research, as they relied on my know how from the previous year. The pipeline is the same for each asset, so I’ll include one of their development as reference.

I modeled the first aid kit it in Maya, creating a low poly and high poly version for baking. This was the first time using Marmoset and at this point only used it for baking, and it was very useful especially the ability to create two types of AO and one of them can ignore groups. The hinges were in one group for example, and the body was in another so the hinges wouldn’t effect the body with its AO maps.

Marmoset Bake: I referenced and repeated this process of baking for the rest of the assets.

videos referenced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wnHgpLBlVY

Substance Painter:

This layering on the First Aid box is pretty much my same method for the rest of my assets, for the first aid box though I used the convexity map to create the telltale outlines. I would either use the convexity or curvature, depending on what the asset reacted best to.

Unreal Test with Outline shader:

For the MRE rations I googled for their labels, edited it in clip studio to make it suitable for an alpha and used the stencil tool to paint on the label.

FLOOR

At this point I started trying to create a couple assets at once. I was told that I should prioritise the main assets like the floors. I tend to overwhelm myself with trying to do multiple things at once thinking it’s the better way and it 100% isn’t. I took that advice and focused on the floors after that.

First, in Maya I did rough 3D concepts on how the planks would look, how they would blend together and what size variation looked good. When I liked the style and variation, I brought in Jasmin’s corner wall to get a good fit of the floor.

Next I moved to Zbrush to create the broken planks. I started from scratch in Zbrush and later created the broken planks with a lasso tool.

At first I was trying to do the grain and texture of wood, but I didn’t like how it was turning out. It was leaning too much toward a realistic style rather than something Telltale would make. I wanted to get a stylised wood grain that would be read clearly from a distance so I started again and used an alpha from a video I had watched. After I referenced another video, and started to pull and push some of the grain and wood texture on the planks, to create more variation. I didn’t go for too much because I had to create a tillable texture from these as well.

First Attempt – I used theses brushes, they created interesting textures but not what the art style called for.

My Second attempt I created more clear wood grain using a dragged out alpha, and inflating the mesh around the grain to add depth. After creating two variations of unbroken planks I replicated them and started to cut away, I tried the mask lasso, polygroup and delete but it wasn’t very clean. My partner has a more recent version of Zbrush with access to the knife tool, so I transferred the mesh cut away at them and imported back to my own laptop. The knife tool resulted in much cleaner cuts, and further clean up was done in Maya.

To get a low poly from the high, I decimated the high poly, UV Mastered, then bringing the low poly into Maya to do some clean up. In Maya separated the mesh and scanned to find and get rid of any floating geometry, then edit mesh merged, which merged vertices together to further clean up the mesh. I then combined the planks together, I went into the UVs to make sure everything was laid out nicely and had to cut some seams.

These are the tutorials I used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTx6D_SCnBE&list=PLqICZRI_9E0GIuyqrVi7gDYHdf94NH5CB&index=87&t=644s

I also used an alpha provided by the link above.

Texturing the planks was very fun, the team and I had liked the idea of wooden floors that leaned toward a purple hue. I referenced The Wolf Among us and The Walking Dead game mainly for dark hues. I did a lot of colour layering to add as much depth to the planks I could get.

Brought the LP planks with base colour into Zbrush. Lined them up so they would be tiling up and down and across. I followed the Flipped Normals Video: Making Tileable Geometry Maps in ZBrush. After this I opened Substance Sampler and ran the tileable texture through it taken from video below and generated the maps I needed to make a tileable material for substance painter. I made the tilting material in Sampler then brought a plane into substance painter and tested it out and it tiled edge to edge, and it worked! I make some custom sets of planks blending the tile into the broken planks.

I used the tile to make sure the planks wouldn’t be cut off and would tile from edge to edge. A bunch of the maps that Substance Sampler generated for the tiling material, to make it Unreal optimised I assigned all the maps and created a smart material, which I then exported as PBR textures.

Heres how they looked! I also kept the broken planks separate and able to download to scatter and add to the broken sets.

RUBBLE

The pipeline for the rubble turned out quite similar to the planks, so I wont rewrite it all again. But I did try a new method of natural looking rubble by using MASH and the shatter effect in Maya. There are two tutorials I watched and referenced to make them. This was a fun experiment and I think the outcome to create a rubble pile that looks natural in a ruined building scene. For the texturing I used the same method as the planks, except due I think to the shape of the rubble it was catching the black curvature layer more so I grouped that layer, added a white mask and hand painted some of it out so it wasn’t as dense.

STARFISH PHOTOGRAMMETRY

We had the opportunity to learn a new skill, which I’m always excited to do. Jasmin and I were the only ones that decided to give it a go, I found it quite tricky because of how careful you need to be in the process of capturing photos. I chose a starfish that I had, and thought would fit nicely into my underwater scene. I didn’t get to explore more of photogrammetry, and the other attempt I did failed due to too much shine on the object. But I was glad I gave it a go and will definetly pursue this skill in the future.

We set up with a lightbox and turntable for the best possible chance of getting high detail images, it’s best not to touch the camera while taking pictures incase you misalign it accidentally so there is a way to connect your phone to the camera to capture images. The camera setting we used were 1/20 shutter speed, aperture f16, Is0: 100 with no flash. Then once we captured the full rotation of the pictures, we uploaded it to agisoft metashape a software that is specifically for photogrammetry. After cleaning up some of the dark points caused by the background of the light box and turntable, this method allowed us to capture every detail within the mesh and the texture.

successful attempt outcome:

failed attempt:

FOLIAGE AND WIND NODES

Creating foliage and wind nodes to effect it was surprisingly easy in comparison to creating the outline shader. I created alphas in shapes I felt would be fitting to the style of tell tale, then made base colours from the alphas. I made two variations – grass and seaweed. I then made a plane that points in three directions, applied vertex painting for the wind nodes to reference, and laid out the uvs over the corresponding alpha. The wind node was ready to use with any of the foliage, whatever base colour, fbx and alpha you wanted just import and assign the maps to the node system. Then bring into foliage mode to paint!

Seaweed:

Grass:

Wind node system:

example of wind node working

I referenced:

https://courses.stylizedstation.com/p/survival-kit

specifically at aprox. 1:45:00 for the node system.

UNREAL 5 ENVIRONMENT & LIGHTING

Making the layout of the environment was pretty easy, I followed my previous 3D block out that I had made in UE5 earlier in the assignment. I built the shell first and the landscape, and gradually filled it in with more assets as they were being uploaded.

I followed a few tutorials I found on underwater environments, as well as videos provided by tutors to achieve my desired look. My favourite was learning how to do general colour changes to a certain area with a post process volume. I felt it was then much easier for me to light the scene when I could see how it would effect the blue hue. If there was one this I could change about this aspect it would be the size of my environment, I thought I had created it in a good size but for a bit I struggled with lighting my scene without having the lights cancel each other out, having some of them as caustics worked out well to light my scene also. I also followed a tutorial and Henry’s content to make the caustic light function.

I also used luts to adjust the colour grade the lighting further, downloading a neutral lut, and a screen shot from my current scene, bringin it into clip studio paint and created editing layers. After I was happy with the colour adjustments to the scene, copy and paste the editing layers to the lut and they should apply the same values. Save the blue-hued lut and apply it to the post process volume, under colour grading lut.

Neutral lut

Blue lut

with and without the post process

I found my laptop was struggling a bit to handle all the textures. I was informed of two options that I could try to help solve it.

Visibility Culling

Increasing Texture Pool Memory

I tried increasing my texture pool memory first. For the visibility culling I would have to apply it to each camera I imported into the scene. Increasing the memory did the trick and was having less trouble with lag and texture issues.

FILMING AND RENDERING

This was my most dreaded part of the assignment, I’m much more comfortable in the 3D asset development stage than the cinematic stage.

I made a very rough storyboard for me to keep on track with what I wanted.

After some feedback about the colour of my scene being a bit monochromatic and one note, I played round with the colour grading settings on the unreal cameras. I felt that an analogous colour palette would work best with my scenes, I liked the blue hues and I didn’t want to stray too far but give more depth and variety. The purple and cyan additions bring calmness to the scenes which I think were missing before.

subtle changed of shadows and midtones mainly.

For film settings I referenced these tutorials.

How filmmakers manipulate our emotions using camera angles and movement

Rendering was absolutely terrible for me.

Originally it was working fine with pngs and exrs, but then the renders when compiled or viewed in file explorer came up black or missing completely. A few people in the class were having the same problem and it was a long mess before figuring out in your unreal project, levels > default streaming method > Always Loaded instead of Blueprint. That worked for a while until my renders continued to fail with no reasoning or issues we could confirm. Testing on multiple computers proved different results, my only options to render was using the uni computers or my partners computer at home. I started to encounter the problem at home and after a long time testing in unreal and after effects, it seemed the alphas were not being ignored or masked out resulting in dark images. Once we made sure the alphas were ignored test renders were working well.

After a few hours I realised that 3 of my sequences had failed, with the similar issue of compiling black. After numerous test renders and looking online I couldn’t find any more answers. Jasmin kindly offered to try it on her after effects, and it worked. So she interpreted the shots that failed on my end and compiled them for me as well. It took 4 full days to be able to render 8 shots.

Here are the settings I used to render, as recommended.

Because I colour graded in unreal and was happy with how the shots looked I edited them as they were. I found myself wishing I could make a shot a second longer or slow it down to match the mood or beat of the music I had chosen. I researched and found these premier pro guides on how to do so, which helped with the pacing of my video. I wish I had more time to experiment with editing, but due to the render issues I was running out of time to submit the assignment.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/premiere-pro/how-to/slow-down-video.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/premiere-pro/using/freeze-frame.html

the music I used: Moonlight Sonata I Adagio sostenuto Beethoven

example shot: