Cinematic

This week I began making and finished my cinematic. To begin the process went into Unreal and filmed my shots. I made sure to focus on the main parts of my scene such as the main tree, the mushroom houses, the glass jars, the fairy circle and the mushroom steps. I also made sure to use interesting and dynamic camera movements. For my cinematic I wanted slow moving shots that flow together so I used slow panning and zooming shots. One shot that I particularly like is the spiral shot going down the inside of the tree. After filming my shots in Unreal I went to Adobe Premiere Pro to edit my cinematic together. After a few days of cutting, tweaking and finding the right music I finished my first draft of my cinematic.

I was very happy with this first draft but I wanted a second opinion so I sent it off to my tutor before he went off for Christmas break. He was very quick to get back to me and offered several bits of constructive criticism:

• Even more colour variation in grass
• Add pebbles along the path
• Add more background trees
• Remove the mirror
• Use LODs for the tree to get better textures for tree
• Make the purple lights move more
• Fix the texture disorientation on the mushroom window frames
• Smooth the large rock in the fairy circle
• Put small bits of grass around rock edges
• Make the ground mushrooms higher poly
• Add more leaves at the top of the tree

 

Some of these were easy fixes but some took a bit more work. I had to redo the foliage again to add more pebbles, background trees and colour changes to the grass. It also wasn’t hard to change the speed of the purple lights. As for adding more leaves to the top of the tree, I simply went into Maya and took some of the leaf branches from the main tree. I brought them into Unreal and added them one at a time.

In order to the make the ground mushroom model higher poly, I went into Maya and simples added more divisions and smoothed the mesh. Thankfully the textures didn’t need to be changed. The window frames were a little more complicated to fix as I had to go back to Maya and UV map the window frames again. I then had to change the textures for it in Substance Painter. Eventually I had them looking nicer.

Unfortunately, I was unable to fix the smoothness of the rocks as no matter how I tired to change the mesh or edit the textures and lighting, they still looked blocky in Unreal. I really wasn’t sure what else to do as this was not a model I made.

Finally, I tried using LODs for my tree. Sadly this did not go well and I was unable to change to resolution of the textures. I tried making a higher ploy model for my tree in Maya then making 4K textures in Substance Painter however, this did not affect the look of my tree at all once I added the new model and textures. I used the new tree as both a LOD and just replaced the model already there however nothing worked. As my tutors were now off for Christmas break I was unable to get any help for this. However, overall I am very happy with my scene and my cinematic.