This project was definitely a challenge for me. Unreal Engine was definitely difficult to get a grasp on. I found it very hard to find where I went wrong and why when I would run into problems, and found nodes very confusing, and still do. I would look up tutorials to get certain effects and put the nodes in place but wouldn’t quite know why I was doing it.

However, our assets look so good in Unreal Engine, it was definitely worth the effort. 3D modeling and texturing is not my strong suit but I definitely felt proud when I finally got my syringe to look how I wanted it to. I was very pleased with how it turned out with the moving, emissive green liquid. I think my team worked really well overall too – everyones’ final video looked great, and I think everyone really nailed the style we were going for.

I was happy with the models I made for this project, however I do wish I had taken on maybe one big, more complex model. Many of my models were quite small accessories. While it would have been unrealistic of me to get it done with the time I had this semester, if I were to do this again, I would like to challenge myself to make one bigger more ornate 3D model. While 3D modeling didn’t interest me at all in the start of this course, I enjoy the feeling of it all coming together when it’s fully rendered.

One thing I would definitely work on for next time is my communication with my team. I was very busy outside of Uni so I didn’t communicate with my team as much as I would have liked to, and feel like I probably missed out on some valuable feedback, or could have bounced around some great ideas with my group members, had I been a bit more online.

Above is my final rendered video for my Science Lab!

Assets by:
Myself
Caity Kerr
Tim Vogan
Timmy Magilton
Mark Smith

Song used:
Escape from Midwich Valley by Carpenter Brut

Our initial inspirations for this project were more retro horror films, such as Young Frankenstein and Re-Animator. For my video, I wanted to give the feel of an 80s horror movie to match these vibes. I used some eerie synth music from Carpenter Brut, and made use of noise effects and chromatic abbaration. I also did a slight bit of colour adjusting to fit the vibe.

Below are some screenshots showing off our assets.

My assets include:

• Glowing syringe
• Surgical tray
• Surgical Scissors
• Screws
• Wall shelves
• Stairs
• Railings
• Tesla poles (minus FX)

After I finished my models and my teammates finished theirs, I was able to begin building my scene in unreal engine.

I built a long hallway for the opening shot, which leads into the main lab. I added my stairs and have a balcony with the surgical table on the second floor. I added a lot of decals to decorate the place, and green lighting for the monitors and test chambers.

Assembling my scene took quite some time, a lot longer than expected. While the layout itself was fairly simple, I had a lot of clutter to decorate the scene and make it feel more messy. A few of my teammates’ models were unfortunately unusable, but luckily there were still plenty of assets to use.

After assembling my scene and setting up my shots, i was ready to render, and that’s when I ran into my biggest issue – my scenes wouldn’t render.

Every time I went to render my scenes, I got an error message. When asking my lecturer for help we still couldn’t get it to work.

It took quite a while to find a solution to my problem, but eventually I found something that worked – I had to go to every single material in my Unreal project and tick these two boxes. I’m still not entirely sure why or how it worked.

There was no way to automate this process (that i knew of) so I had to manually do this for over 100 materials, which took a long time – this also happened on the day of the deadline itself so it was definitely setting me back.

Luckily, this method worked. Unfortunately this stopped the flickering lights I had in my scene from working, and I was unable to figure out how to get them working again, but at the end of the day I was just glad to be able to render my scenes.

Our Concept

When beginning to brainstorm for our Science Lab, I created a collaborative Pinterest board for my teammates to add to as they wish. We spent some time in class scrolling through pinterest and bouncing ideas off each other, showing each other videos, films, or photos that inspired us, etc.

Movies like Re-Animator and Young Frankenstein came to mind, as we wanted to go for a more exhaggerated style rather than a realistic horror style. We looked through our inspirations and took note of any assets we thought may work with our scene.

To get an idea of what it would be like to layout our scene, we made a rough mock up of what our scene would look like. This gave us an idea of what assets we could make to fill up the space.

We ended up coming up with a story for our lab; it would be a mad scientist’s lab, a scientist who would mess around with human life and organis creatures. This would give us the opportunity to have some items like body parts, blood, etc. Our story is that a monster, at one stage, was restrained in the lab and has escaped, leaving the lab abandoned and in a state if dissaray. This would really give us a chance to make some fun assets to make a cluttered, messy lab space, plus since the monster escaped we wouldn’t have to model it.

I really liked the idea of having a sort of balcony where the most dramatic scene would take place; the re-animation of some kind of frankenstein’s monster. Two tesla poles would be on either side, and we could even use some particle effects for them.

Modeling Assets

The first asset I began developing was the syringe.

This was a very basic version of the syringe. Once I made the basic shape, I thought, how could I exhaggerate it to fit with our style?

Herbert West’s syringe in Re-Animator was my original reference, but I wanted to exhaggerate it more and began looking at 19th century medical apparatus. I like the two hoops you see on older looking syringes and decided to add those. I also tilted the vial to make it more cartoonish.

This was my final sculpt.

I ended up making a few items of medical apparatus to go beside the frankenstein operating table we had in our heads. I had no issue modeling the tray. I assumed the surgical scissors would be simple, but it ended up being weirdly complicated – it’s an odd shape and the blades aren’t quite symmetrical so I had to do some adjustments, I couldn’t just copy one half and paste it.

We had a team meeting and discussed some items we were lacking and I agreed to make some shelving and the Tesla pole.

For the shelves, I didn’t want to just make a rectangle and slap a wood texture on it. I wanted to make something that would really fit in with our environment. Caity’s wall and floor textures were a textured metal, so I decided to do metal shelves with some screws haphazardly sticking out of them. I was inspired by Dr. Finkelstein’s lab from The Nightmare before Christmas.

I used this tutorial to make the screws, and it took way longer than expected. It was a much more complicated shape than anticipated, and I made some mistakes along the way. I wanted to make the screws right so they could be a stand-alone model for decoration, and so they could be used in other assets. This tutorial taught me how to use the Lattice tool, which I found very useful with later models too.

I used it to curve the wires for the tesla poles.