Setting Up Assets and Materials
I had 2 previous scenes made for this, but I wanted a totally new start to I made a new file to start fresh. On my main level, I spent time setting up textures, materials, and instances as well as all of the assets, getting everything into the correct folders I made; this honestly took about a day! But it was necessary and helped to see what objects still needed work and how to apply the materials to certain assets (like the door, which took a while to get correct due to all the elements!).
I also started thinking about how I would make the scenes, I knew I wanted a long hallway intro with some spooky lighting and twisty camera movement, so I tackled that area first on a new level. I was more torn on the second scene; I knew what I wanted to show but didn’t know how best to go about setting up the room, should I make it all in one level or should I split the dining room, foyer and office? I realised that even with all of our assets, the rooms may look quite empty or feature mostly the same objects, so I decided the best way to space all these assets out and keep an eye on how I was distributing them would be to just make everything in one room. So I had level 1 with a hall, and level 2 with the main 3 rooms!
Plugging Textures
Thankfully plugging the textures was quite easy, if repetitive. Still it took me around half a day to get everything ready! Everything that could have given me issues was answered helpfully by my team, some members even made little videos on how to use certain asset textures, like Dayna’s wall (using virtual textures for the detail) or Matthew’s candles subsurface scattering.
One of the main problems I came across was the inkpot and how to make a material appear like glass. Jennifer linked us to a very helpful tutorial which worked perfectly, and I could even edit the colour of the glass. I used this tutorial for the bookshelf’s glass windows, also.
As my room was quite small I only really used 3 of the 5 walls, one with no pillar, a normal one and a wonky one for some variation. I had to use VTs for the detail areas on these walls. The only problem I faced with the walls was them not being double sided as I forgot to check that on in the beginning and it seemed like there was no fixing it no matter how I tried to overcome it. At least it isn’t a big deal in my scene.
Building The Scene
Bringing everything into my scene was really enjoyable! I spent hours placing different assets to make the room feel lived in and messy; candles and books strewn everywhere. It was a little finnicky with some assets so I had to use the sliders docked on the right, which took even more time.
Adding all of the small details like the candles was quite fun, I may even have too many in my scene since I was just adding them everywhere! There were a couple of bare areas, like under the stairs as you can see here where I just added another bookshelf, and around the corners. We made a lot of assets, but it would have been nice to have a plant or small table or bin or something extra, just to fill corners. It was hard thinking of all of the things we would need to make when we planned an office, foyer and dining room! It may have been easier just doing one room and a hallway.
Finally I got most of the assets into the scene, as well as a ceiling. At this stage, there were a few assets still to come like the chairs, piano stool and textures for the utensils and bookshelf. I’m pleased with the layout of the room, seeing as I had to start from scratch as my initial floorplans wouldn’t work. There’s one issue seen here, where the wall the knight it against is only 1 sided which I unfortunately couldn’t fix. I figured having the knight there would help disguise it a bit!
Extra Details
Getting into some of the areas and placing assets was quite tricky at times! Here, I was trying to fill up the bookshelf’s shelves which was quite tedious but I’m glad I spent the time doing it. It really adds much more detail to the room!
One of my group members, Matthew, made fire, cobwebs and dust particles for us to use in the scene which was my next thing to tackle. He made very useful videos showing how to add them to the scene so I just had to follow these! I could add some wind effects to the cobweb, and for the fire I would have to add some point lights on top of them and edit the subsurface scattering of the candles, as well. The candles look so good, thanks to Matthew who showed us how to make the wax react to the point light on the fire!
Decals
Alongside the video on blackboard and this video I was able to make 2 different kinds of decals, translucent ones for some muddy footprints and opaque ones for the portraits and wall rips. I followed this video mostly, making materials out of the images, setting the result node to a decal, and setting the decal blend mode to Dbuffer translucent colour if I was making something opaque.
The footprints didn’t need much work, I liked the translucency and shine on them, it added some more contrast to the floorboards which are similar in colour to the mud. They’re subtle, but I really like the effect!
This second video also helped a lot when it came to layering decals (I used this for rips behind picture frames) and making sure the meshes on top of any decals don’t have them projected (unchecking ‘receives decals’ in the mesh options).
Portrait Decals
In my own scene, I have 9 picture frames which I would like to have different images for. As our theme is animal anatomy in terms of furniture design and we had a general concept of the house belonging to a taxidermist, I themed the portraits after this! I tried to keep a consistent brush size and type (mostly a square brush with texture, so as to match the blocky look of the assets) but I still wanted these to be detailed as when I brought in an unfinished version of the cat, it was clear that more detail would look better.
For the larger frames I spent more time on the details of the portraits, for example the woman and faun or the rabbit, and the smaller frames could easily house the more simple portraits like the cat or giraffe. I am more experienced with drawing animals and stylising them so I stuck with mostly silly toony ‘photographs’, perhaps of the taxidermist’s victims or animals he particularly likes! Our assets are all stylized to be wonky, simple and square so I thought that the toony style fit better than realism. Although my style isn’t very consistent, I tried to keep most elements similar like the Victorian backgrounds and most colours though I realise the portraits are a bit mismatched with some being very toony and thickly lined (the dog) whereas others are a bit more detailed and thinner (the rabbit). Still I really like the outcome of all of these!
As a final touch I also wanted to have a diploma, or something similar, that really confirmed the taxidermist idea. I wasn’t really sure what to put on it aside from the basics! It comes across however in the scene which is all that matters.
Getting all the images the correct sizes and rotations before replacing with the finished portraits.
Lighting
I started with the hallway scene, as this would be the most simple to light. The grand door has an area for a window, that has a stained glass texture so I had to figure out how to achieve this look.
The way I tackled it may seem a bit too complex, I’m sure there’s a simpler way! But what I did was make 3 materials, plug the stained glass PNG RGBs separately into the emissive colour node and set the result node as a light function. Then, I made 3 spot lights all in the exact same position, changed the light colours to red, green and blue and plugged the light functions into the correct spotlights based on colour. This worked really well! It was a bit finnicky but the effect is really cool. I’m sure there are other ways to do this, I think even members of my group did it differently, perhaps with a decal on the floor, or making a material out of the stained glass image itself, put it on a plane and edit the translucency (I tried it this way in the beginning as my team member Dayna showed images of how she did it, but I must have done something wrong as it didn’t work for me).
Baking Lights
This was my first bake, with just a rect light behind the camera; though it was still too dark.
I liked the high contrast just a rect light would give, the effect it gave reminded me of a horror game! But I wanted my scenes to be colourful, and especially here I was determined to get it the way I imagined; warm lighting, still dark but light enough for details (like the planks) to be visible, which isn’t the case here. Also, the way the light catches on the door is strange, and though I wanted the door to be illuminated so as to see it’s details the door in this bake is too bright.
Fire and Flicker
I gave the fireplace fire a point light at some point, and though I thought this looked good, as it was vibrant and casted a long shadow over the floor, it was still missing something. I wanted to have some movement in the light, a slight flicker or flares in the intensity like actual fires have, so I watched some of the videos linked on Blackboard.
I started by trying the material method, editing the nodes and changing the material to a light function, seen below. This gave a cool effect, but it wasn’t right for a soft fire flicker. It was too harsh, and changed in intensity too much.
There was another tutorial, on how to make a flicker using a blueprint actor. After watching the video the result seemed much more promising as I could have complete control over the general brightness, speed, randomness and changes in intensity. It took a lot of time getting it just right, but I’m very happy with the reuslt! It’s quite subtle but much softer than before.
I only added this effect to the fireplace, and in the hallway’s chandelier (though I changed the settings for the hall to be much dimmer). I had added this to some candles as well as I intended to have a flicker on all fires, but didn’t look great all together, I preferred the static point lights instead.
Rendering and Editing
Making the cameras and shots was tedious, but still quite enjoyable, I found myself spending hours just on one scene! I had a couple of problems along the way of making my shots, I accidently rendered one of the longer shots to be far too slow, and ended up with over 8’000 frames I had to edit in after effects (this was an easy fix though). Still, it took my laptop quite a while to get through all of the renders.
I wanted to try showcase the details of all the models, so my final project is quite long, but I really wanted to show the work my team and I put into these assets. I wished I could have set the fire spot light intensity way lower, and maybe focus more on some of the dust FX since this looked so cool in the actual scene. I tried at first to have my shots be wobbly and tilted, like you see in German horror expressionist films but I actually preferred the slow pans and low angles; I think this is just easier to watch. However, my scene doesn’t look so much haunted as it does ‘owned by crazy scientist’, probably because of my colourful, bright lighting, but hopefully the music helps a little bit! I wanted a range of colours, I just thought this was more interesting and sort of fit the style, plus it seems unnatural so perhaps this helps make it spookier? However there are parts of the lighting I wish I had of changed; the pink light under the desk is very distracting, the cracks in the wood as a bit too bright (I did want some light shining through them, I thought this would look spooky) and the height fog didn’t react the way I wanted it to; I should have done some more research in how to make it properly.
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