Assignment 1
During our first week back into the second year of university, we were given an assignment to create a short cinematic film using an environment as the storytelling medium. We were then asked to make up group of 4 – 6 people choose what kind of theme we’d want our environment to be based off of a selection of 10 different themes given to us. After having a vote we all ended up deciding that the most popular choice between us was the ancient temple.
Based on the ancient temple theme we spent some time to explore what kind of ancient temple we’d want to create. We first started off by doing research into various different temples from all different countries around the globe to see which of them we liked the most and had elements that would suit well for the project. At the start we had the idea to create an environment based off of our own made up culture, taking design elements from the research we had previously done, however after delving further into what kind of work load that would give us, we decided to dial back our scale a bit and just settled on making a Tomb or temple based off of old Egyptian architecture.
As a group we had all gathered together various references of Egyptian tombs and ruins, both real and fake with concept art or various other media. After gathering these all we had decided that it would be best for us as a group to make our environments look realistic.
When we first were starting off we needed to make an asset list and so I asked everyone to sent me a list of everything they thought they would need in their environment, after taking in those suggestions I went though them and condensed them into an asset list for us all to go over in a meeting and add or remove assets based on if we thought it would be useful for our environment or not. After that I made a spreadsheet task manager to let anyone show the group what they want to work on, what they are working on or what they’ve already done, in order to help prevent confusion in the group on who’s doing what and help organise the group a bit.
Maya:
I had done some research into Egyptian history and mythology and had discovered that the pots had a strong connotation with death, pots were used for holding the perfumes used for mummification and children who had died would be put into pots and it was seen by many at the time as a sort of symbol of rebirth,. For my tasks I was responsible for making small pot props and torches for the group to scatter around their environments and had based these all of real Egyptian pots I had previously researched.
When going into Maya it was a mostly a pretty simple process of getting references as a guide and using subdivisions and the extrusion tool to try and emulate the shape as best as I could, however there was a couple of things that I had to try and figure out as I went, for example for this pot I had to use the bridge tool. To make this pot I needed to have two large curved handles on both sides of the pot and so I looked up online how I could add handles to something, one tutorial I found used the bridge tool and so I thought I would try that out myself however in doing so I ended up making a few ngons around where the bridge connected to the body, after looking up some videos on fixing ngons however they were gone in no time.
For the torch, I wanted to have two different versions of it, one where all the meshes were combined and another where each part it laid out individually. I wanted to do to give the rest of my group some freedoms when it came to using my props, they could either use it to have a simple torch on a wall, or perhaps use the individual parts as set pieces to tell a story or a decrepit old Egyptian temple.
Substance Painter:
When going into substance I knew that the textures would be carrying most of the load when trying to make these models look realistic, and so I spent a lot time doing research into making good textures in substance. With my research I learned a good bit about how smart materials are made and how I can go about making my own. To save myself time I made a few smart martials using the materials, masks grunges etc. for the pots to use as a base and from there I would tweak and change them to meet the sort of look I was trying to achieve.
Some of the pots I had researched had hand painted designs on them, and I wanted to try and replicate that. To do so was actually fairly simple all I had to do was create paint layer and paint the designs on myself, to help give the pots an aged look I would put masks on top of them to make it seem that the paint has started to fade or has been scratched off.
Unreal Engine:
Once I had moved onto Unreal everyone had their work done and sitting in a one drive for everyone to use. In the beginning we had all decided to make our own environments. To start off I imported all of the assets and made all the necessary materials for my environment, after that I had moved onto doing a rough block out with cube brushes and the assets I had previously imported. I started off with just a hall and door frame but eventually moved onto the large scale tomb / ruin.
I knew that I want to make this place have a large scale to make it seem like the place where we’re in is very important. After laying out where I wanted the alter and main pillars, I began to scatter around some of the larger assets like the scaffolding and Anubis statues and have them next to my mannequin to judge if I was happy with the scale of the room.
Once that was done I moved right onto the wall, floor and boxes, the walls were a pain since I had to manually place each block and make sure it was lined up correctly and had enough room without clipping through other objects, however once I had a few lines of them down I was able to group them together and copy the group, making my time putting in the my wall much easier. The floor was simply just tiles which has a seamless texture and I had placed the boxes in such a way to make it seem like archaeologists had just arrived and had started setting up their equipment, ready to discoverer everything in the tomb.
I felt the floor was a bit barren so decided to look though some of my references to find some inspiration to fill in the space, that’s when I had someone concept where they had a water pit in the middle of the room and I wanted to try that out for myself. However to do that I needed to find way to make water in my room, I found a tutorial online which really helped, instead of making some sort of water simulation I could use a basic plane and apply a material to it which make it look like a water surface. I had also made a couple of changed to a couple of other martials while I was working on this, I had made 2 copies of the floor trimsheet and make some changes to them in the materials editor, making a dark gray and white version and re-purposed them to be used in various different parts of my environment.
Once I had my water I began to scatter around smaller assets like pots, books, lights, generators etc. to reinforce the idea that the area has been recently occupied, and then it was onto the lighting. For the lighting I just wanted the area to be lit up by the lights I had place into my environment, so I added in a few Spotlights in front of where the head of my floor lights making it seem like the light was emanating from them, because the only lights I had were spotlights I had to greatly increase the intensity of the Spotlights so that I wasn’t stuck with dozens of spotlights all around my scene. In my scene also contained a directional light, however it was only used at the tomb / ruin entrance to make it look like the sun was shining directly inside which had a really appealing effect in my opinion.
Editing:
Finally the last part of the process, to edit the video I used adobe premier pro to take all of the jpeg sequences and put them into into video clips, I then took those clips and laid them out in the order I wanted them. I did some research into some Middle Eastern, African and Egyptian music that was free before coming across the song Desert Caravan by Aaron Kenny, I put it into my timeline and moved and cut some of my clips to line up closer to the beat, making each transition feel a bit more satisfying. After I was done with the music and video clips, all that was left was the title and outro text, all I had to do to make them was use the text tool and type in my text, I thought it would have been a good idea too to have the texts fade out to match the smooth and calming mood the music of Desert Caravan was giving the video. Once all that was done, all that there was left to do was render it out!
Reflection:
Overall I think this project was a serious challenge for me, outside of the crashes and corrupted projects I had to deal with, I haven’t used 3D software or a 3D game engine in the past so there was many different hurdles to overcome and things to learn but in the end I think I did decent despite all of that. It felt good to work together with others to help them create these extravagant ruins and tombs and I was nice to see what I type of environment I could from the assets we had all made together.
I liked the idea of us all doing a ancient temple, there were so many different ways we could have gone with it, I was hoping to be a bit more extravert with something like a space alien temple but considering most of us have very little to no experience with the software we were using, keeping it simple with an Egyptian themed temple / ruin worked out well for us.
I’m glad I was able to experience using something like UE4 as well, having a few game dev friends always had Unreal and Unity stuck in my head as something to try out, but having it be used in an assignment and have things laid out with video tutorials and such was a good way for me to get into it, I’ll defiantly be thinking about using it again sometime in the future!