Introduction
One of the biggest elements in this assignment introduces me to Unreal Engine, an animation engine developed by Epic Games. This is one of the most commonly used engines in the creation of video games and it is currently on its Fifth Version, however I will be using the previous i.e: Fourth Version for this project. Using the assets that my team members and I have created, I will be putting together my own version of ‘The Forge’, setting up its lighting and capturing footage that will be finally constructed in Adobe’s Premier Pro as one video. I have already uploaded a copy of my weapons and armour onto my teams One-Drive so they can access the assets at any time. In turn I will download their assets as they are uploaded onto the system.
For the purposes of clarity I will be going over the process based of the activity i.e: assembly and lighting instead of timing to avoid repetition and making it easier to navigate.
Unreal Program Set Up
After I created an Epic Games account and downloaded the install files for the Fourth Version of Unreal Engine I opened up a new project. I set the project type to animations, films and television and saved it into a newly created folder in my second memory drive ensure I had adequate spare capacity. In this folder as well are the models and textures as made by my team. Once was in the newly created Unreal Project I constructed and organised several folders so I could cleanly import all the assets into the project in a neat and organized way.
Scene Assembling
One at a time, starting with my weapons, I imported our teams models and textures into the project, commencing the application of the materials. With the help of Henry, I was able to navigate through the Unreal systems of adding the texture maps to the related material, although Henry informed me to delete the height maps as they were not required for this project. A problem occurred that was both frustrating and time consuming, involved some team members uploading their models as OBX files instead of a FBX file. This caused me issues, as I couldn’t upload the files into my system due to inter-capability problems, i.e: OBX model had only one material shot leading to only one set of texture like Gold getting added and the rest like Silver and Wood unable to be applied . Along with this I couldn’t access Najib’s files because my computer did not recognise them until we figured he was compressing his files using WinRaR, a program not installed on my computer. Once WinRaR was installed on my computer I could access them easily.
As I received each of my additional assets from the team, I assembled the 3D environment adding their materials, whilst keeping my work desk organised. Adding the 3D models proved simple enough as all that was required was moving then to their location and adjusting them to my liking similar to how you would build a house in Minecraft or Lego. The more difficult elements in assembling the piece was applying their materials but that difficulty was due to the file compatibility issues I mentioned earlier. Adding the textures in Unreal took me a while to get used to, however one I figured out how to carry it out, it proved pretty simple. Each texture id split off into different map types i.e: base colour, metallic, roughness etc. which have to be moved into their respective materials and connected to that associated nodes. The images below give a visual example.
Lighting and Post Production Effects
Once the majority of the models are in the scene , with the help of Henry, we began work on the lighting. For the scene I only needed three light based actors. The first one controlled the time of day and automatically built light and shadows based off its position. Where the light was positioned was placed exactly where the sun would be in real time and rotating the light source would adjust the time of day. This means the scene could be at all times from early in the morning to last thing at night. This would also change the colour of the sky box to match the time of day. My second actor was more of an ambient lighting effect. It is not used for hard points of light source but rather it was to ensure the interior of the building was bright enough for my cameras to see inside it. Without this light source because there is only one window and no spaces between the brick walls the room would be otherwise too dark. The final lighting effect was a small intensive red light, to act as the lighting that would come from the heated furnace when it gets added into the scene to reflect heat. I rebuild the lighting once all the modals where added in, so the lighting would acutely render and reflect off each modal.
Camera Rigging
As part of the assignment I am to upload a video of my final environment which will be around 15-30 seconds duration. This is due to Unreal 3D files being very large and data consuming, that sometimes even sending a zipped version could cause technical problems, so this would be an easier data reliant way of demonstrating the final work piece. As it would take a while for me to figure out the set up, the camera and animating systems operate on similar functions to those that are found in Maya. This means that once mastered it, the system proved easier to operate. I just needed to bear in mind that transform is the important asset instead of keyframe. I would utilise two cameras to cover all the shots and angles that were needed.
Rendering and Video Editing
I assembled the complete video into Adobe Premier Pro as I have carried out with all my previous video projects. Then I exported my camera’s footage from my Unreal Project as mp4s where I then uploaded them into a new Premier Pro file. Whilst I will have a textbox at the start of the footage to indicate that this is my version of the footage for the project Henry indicate that I would not require music as it was not part of the grading system. With those factors in mind I created the video by cutting my footage up and repositioning them throughout the timeline. I tried to sort out the footage so that key elements would not be highlighted twice in a row. An example is where I would not have two shots with a heavy focus on the shelving unit side by side in the timeline. Once I was satisfied with my video I then exported it as a clean video file. Then I would upload the video file to my YouTube account under the unlisted section adding the link to my Blog. Additionally I would upload both the video file, a compressed/zipped copy of my 3D project and any accompanying word documents of links relate to this project onto Student Blackboard for submission.
15-30 second final video: