WEEK TWO: UNREAL ENGINE
This week in the morning class went through an unreal engine tutorial. We started with a short menti quiz to quickly remind ourselves of the information we learnt in the recorded lecture we needed to watch before class — and then we watched the pre-prepared tutorial in the morning.
This was a practical tutorial of unreal. We were taught how to sculpt environments in the engine, and then Henry took us through how to make a custom material – so after I sculpted a simple mountain range using the landscape sculpting tools, we got to that.
Making the material was very confusing for me, and I’m still kind of shaky on where I stand with it, but Henry walking us through how to create it and how to link them together was definitely super helpful – as now I know how to take multiple materials, link them up, and then use them like layers on a canvas on the landscape.
When we had made the custom material and painted the landscape with grass, moss, rock and basalt we went through the foliage and landscaping modes to add plants, trees and rocks to our base environment. We could change the density of the foliage and trees, as well and the minimum and maximum scale they could place as. This is a very cool and flexible program and I’m excited to make a cool environment in it. It’s VERY complicated to me right now though so it’s going to be a steep learning curve, I still don’t really understand how a lot of this works – but I’ve done this in one day so I am confident I can make a good final outcome with my group.
After I added different bushes, grass and leaves to the foliage brush that used the saved models on the project, I laid down the groundwork for the shrubs and such that littered my landscape, when I was happy with that, I changed the items under my foliage brush to differing models of trees, and covered my landscape in trees. I also then went in and added a few stones and rocks, but I don’t think I added enough In the final outcome.
Now that my final landscape is done after following the tutorial, I’m so surprised I was able to make this in a single morning after never having used this program before! I think it looks pretty good! As I mentioned before – I think I could’ve added a few more rocks and boulders since it is meant to be a small mountain range, but I like how I laid out the trees and I think the landscape overall looks quite natural.
In the afternoon, we were told to start blocking out our enviroment in a 3D space, we could use either Unreal or Maya. I decided to use Maya as I’m more proficient in modelling on there. I had to set Maya up for this, firstly by setting the scale. Sculpts in Maya are usually 1cm, but I wanted my environment to be to actual scale. So I imported a human model, used the measuring tool to find what 1m would be, and started to create my concepts to scale. We were assigned a presentation for next week to show everyone our groups project so far secondly in the afternoon. So our groups first point of action whie we were blocking out our concepts was to start planning for the presentation and give ourselves a general timescale to put it together.
We organised this and threw the plan into our groups discord server so we could look back on it and wouldn’t forget what we needed to do. And for the rest of the day and week continued blocking out our environments to showcase in the presentation, as well as do our work for the presentation.
I experimented a lot with the building in this blocking out stage, and expanded my concepts a whole lot. Now that I could bring my concepts into a 3D space and work to scale it really allowed me to experiment and create new ideas to work off of, as well as allow me to add things from my other group members concepts into my own work.
I deviated from my concepts before by adding an entryway onto the building, and I think it added a lot more interest to the building than there was before, I also added a small tower to the side, and areas for stained glass windows at the back of the building. I’m also very happy with the small fences I put in the second floor of the entryway, as well as all the accent pillars.
I added a small fringe roof to the main part of the building that leads off the edges of the main building’s shape to form a circular shape, so that the dome can still be circular. I still haven’t decided if the whole dome will be glass or if it’ll be segmented and close over. The general size of the building also increased dramatically when I was blocking out, as the original concepts I made seemed very cramped and small when I brought it over into Maya and put it to scale. I think I added a lot more interest to the building from my original concepts as well, it was very spherical in the original – and I feel like I’ve split it up and added differing shapes and buildings to definitely add more interest successfully. In the future I might add even more interest, maybe with more small connected buildings, rooms or general shapes.
In general, blocking out this environment was so much more helpful than I thought it’d be, and allowed me to expand much more on my ideas. My group will be merging all of our ideas soon and taking things they like and incorporating them and leaving out parts that aren’t as good, so doing this will allow us all to look at and tour our individual concepts in a 3D space to scale and see what works and what doesn’t for each of us.