Month: June 2022

After discussions last week, we needed to build about 6-7 scenes for the whole trailer. I talked to Guanzhe and he chose to build the forest scene, the cave scene and the forbidden zone scene, while I was responsible for the remaining four scenes. We opted for a 2.4:1 aspect ratio to give the shots a nice cinematic feel.
This week I’m starting to get a little more familiar with the basics of Unreal Engine 4. I found that Unreal Engine 4 is mainly used for asset integration, I need to use other software to create assets and finally imported them into Unreal Engine 4. This week I mainly study the creation of terrain and material tiling, material tiling is a very tricky problem because the effect of using a single map is very single as shown.

Obviously, this does not work well, as it is too repetitive and lacks detail in one image. In the end, Finally, I added three texture postings to the terrain material, one for the soil, one for the rocks and one for the grass. In addition, to blend the three maps, I used the PixelDepth node to handle the tiling effect and the VertexNormalWS node to allow the map to change based on the slope of the terrain. with the following final result.

This week I also focus on the trees assets creation, I found it very easy to create trees by using Speedtree, there are a lot of useful nodes in it, I can easily create all kinds of tree shapes I want, and you can also add wind fields to make the trees move.

This is the effect of importing into Unreal Engine 4

The Unreal engine is very fast and renders well. Next week I will focus on the grass and start working on my first scene.

We had a second meeting this week and ended up picking some key shots for our trailer to ensure that we could tell the story clearly and reduce some of the workloads. In the days that followed, Zhenzhong found some music for the film and made a demo that will serve as a reference for our future work. Most of our shots could be done in UnrealEngine 4, with a few close-ups done in Maya using Arnold.

After that, we started working on the assets. Guanzhe and I were mainly responsible for the scenes, while Zhenzhong and Ziyin would work on the characters and props.

As I hadn’t worked with Unreal before, I probably needed to spend some more time researching the Unreal engine and I started by identifying what techniques we would probably need for these shots. After that, I looked up some tutorials and studied them. After that, I will start laying out the environment.

In the first week, our team finalised our story outline after two discussions.

We changed parts of the previous script and made it shorter than the old one. Taking into account the time constraints, we decided to make a trailer for the film. This allowed us to show some more of the highlights, which lasted about 90 seconds. So we could spend more time on the quality of the footage.

First, I researched the environment we envisioned on pinterest, ArtStation and collected some reference images. I then found some film footage that fit our story and took screenshots to use as our storyboard, focusing mainly on the placement of the shots, the frame and the main colour of the environment.