Category: Project_1

The Deep Mist (A Cthulhu Style CG Trailer)

Showreel:

Team Members and Roles:

Zhenzhong Liang: Story; Storyboard; Character Modeling; Character Texturing; Main Editing; Compositing;

Ziyin Wang: Story; Storyboard; Creature Eye Modeling; Creature Eye Texturing; Animation; Compositing;

Yaozhang Zhong: Story; Storyboard; Environment Layout; Lighting; Camera Animation; Rendering; Compositing;

Guanze Wu: Story; Storyboard; Rigging; Environment Layout; Lighting; Camera Animation; Rendering; Compositing;

story brief:

The year 2025, the organization detects that an abnormal radiation signal is expanding in the restricted area. Several inspectors have been sent to the area to investigate the signal and collect evidence, but the base lost contact soon. Therefore, the organization asks two inspectors to continue collecting evidence and try to find the investigation team.
The investigation goes well at the beginning. However, as the investigation expanded, inspectors find some bodies of the investigation team. They also find a mysterious cave inside the abandoned area. After entered in the cave, they realized that there is some mysterious forces inside the area……

Storyboard

We made our own version of the storyboard based on the work we had agreed to do and then put together a collage of everyone’s storyboards to form a complete version.

Reflections

For me, this project was a lot of fun. We used a combination of a new animation process to complete our trailer. More importantly, I explored Unreal Engine 4 and other technologies, which was probably one of the biggest challenges for me on this project. Maya and Unreal Engine 4 combined to significantly speed up our process, especially the rendering time, which was convenient and easy to use.

Also, some parts of the project didn’t have enough time to be polished due to the very limited time available. I think we could have continued to optimise our lighting and animation if we had had time. Nevertheless, we have achieved our goals in this project. I learned a lot from it and enjoyed it.

This week I focused on rendering all the scenes I was responsible for and compositing the shots.

The shots I was responsible for were all rendered in Unreal Engine 4.

I used the post-processing volume in Unreal Engine to adjust the colour and contrast, and for one of the close-ups, I exported the z-channel and then did a simple depth-of-field composite in Nuke.

I chose blue-green as the primary colour for these shots. I used colour correction in PR to adjust the colour and contrast. I then added motion blur, vignetting and camera grain to these shots.

Finally, I put all the shots together and edited them in PR. The initial edit file was already set up for us by Zhenzhong. So I was able to replace the assets in his file and finish the edit very quickly. I only changed some shot sequences to make the pacing more satisfying.
Then I exported the final video. The quality of it was very satisfying. I really like the atmosphere in the final trailer. The final video will be posted on the submission post

This week I have been concentrating on our opening shot, which is a large panorama involving a lot of terrains, vegetation, trees etc. Based on my previous experience, I started by finding some reference scenes on Pinterest that fit the scene, and then started with the terrain, editing the terrain a little bit, the good thing is that the terrain doesn’t need to be very precise compared to the model, it just needs a rough shape. I then planned some rivers and roads on the terrain to give a sense of hierarchy to the whole forest. Secondly, as I was making a push shot, I divided my shot into three parts based on the reference image: foreground, middle and background.

Some References

I mainly focused on making the middle scene, making the peaks according to the reference, and then using the vegetation brush to paint the trees in layers, the idea of making this big scene is the same as the previous two scenes, but because this scene involves too many objects, even Unreal Engine 4 often lags or even flickers

I created the background using Worldcreater, which I had already used in my co-op unit the last term. I only created one mountain, the others were rotated and scaled to create some sense of difference.

After some discussion this week, I decided to add some camera animation to make the scenes look less stagnant.

Unreal Engine 4 animation is very different from Maya, I created a new sequence, added the camera into the sequence and set the camera animation in the sequence.

I then added some fog effects, added a sky sphere and modified the tone of the whole I then added some fog effects, added a sky sphere and modified the tone of the whole scene. The final result is as follows, you can see that the sky sphere I added doesn’t seem to match the scene, but the good thing is that as it is a distant scene, and I have modified the tone, there is no obvious difference.

I’ve finished all the scene set up and next week I’ll be importing Ziying’s animations into the Unreal engine and then finishing the final renders.

Last week I gave Ziying the terrain I had already created to animate, so this week I started working on how to import the animations I had made in Maya into Unreal Engine 4. The skeletal system is different between the two software systems, so it was a bit difficult to get it into Unreal Engine 4.
The first thing I tried was to export the animation in abc format in Maya, and I found that although I had no problem importing the animation in this format, the abc format uses a material sphere by default, so I couldn’t reassign a material to my imported character. So I tried to use the exported fbx file format. But I still encountered two problems
1: The animations imported into Unreal Engine 4 are walking in place and not displaced.
2: The materials need to be completely reassigned.
My solution: problem 2 is relatively easy to solve, I just need to spend some more time rebuilding and specifying the mapping. Problem 1 I recreated the displacement animation in Unreal Engine 4. The animation in Unreal Engine 4 is a bit more complicated and cumbersome than in Maya, I had to be very careful with the positioning to avoid foot displacement.

After that, I started working on the third scene. The third scene is relatively straightforward, this one is a close-up with a scale in the foreground, the feet of two agents in the midground and the forest in the background. As it was a close-up I needed to set up the scene with much less content. I set up the camera according to the reference I found, and then placed the objects according to the camera screen. I replaced the scales with a sphere and the two agents with the basic human model from Unreal Engine 4.

Next week I’ll start working on the first panoramic scene, after which I’ll need to work on adding camera animations in Unreal Engine 4, which is looking very good so far. Keep up the good work!

This week I finished the first scene, added the blood decal effect to the scene and started building the second scene.
The principle of decals is to create a projection that projects the decal onto the object and adds bump, reflection and other effects.
I found some blood decals from the internet, created decal materials in Unreal Engine 4 and tested them. Here are the results.

I then placed the blood decal in the scene, but I found that the blood was not projected on the plants but directly on the ground, which was weird. After some research, I found that the reason for this was that I had used a plant brush to paint the plants, and they were not in the scene as a mesh. My solution was always. This gave my scene a lot more detail.

After completing the first scene, I started working on the second scene, which was a scene of two investigators searching the forest. With the experience from the first scene, the second scene went much more smoothly. There are a lot of resources, such as trees, rocks, terrain, etc., that are common. I also added some ferns to enrich the scene. I copied the lighting and fog from the first scene.
Nevertheless, I took some time to set up the scene so that the plants would look realistic; for example, the ferns would grow close to the big trees. I also placed the rocks according to a reference map I had found.

Next week I’ll be working on exporting animations from Maya to Unreal Engine 4, and I also need to export the scene that I’ve built to Ziying so he can do the animation. There are two more scenes I need to finish. Go for it!

This week I finished the first scene of our trailer: the forest scene, which will probably be optimised later in the production.
I started by working on how to create more realistic lighting in Unreal Engine 4 and testing various fog effects.

To give the lighting a more realistic effect, I used a dynamic material map to add shadow detail and give the lighting a wooded feel on the ground.

Lastly, I optimised the scene I had built last week so that it was surrounded by fog, giving it a misty forest feel and more closely matching the reference image I had found.

Next week I will be working on how to create decals in Unreal Engine 4, as this scene is a corpse pit scene with a lot of blood, I decided to use decals to create the blood effect.

This week I’ve been working on the grass in Unreal Engine 4. In beginning, I downloaded a grass model from Bridge and Imported it into Unreal Engine 4 and then attached a texture to it, the result looks like this.

The result of this test was not satisfactory, the grass was very fake, I think it was the lack of dynamic effects, so I continued to study how to make the grass move, I used the WorlPosition Offset node, using a noise wave map to make the model swaying effect, and then use the two-dimensional gradient map to make the upper part of the grass move, the lower part of the grass does not move, so as to achieve the effect of wind blowing grass.

The results looked good, but I thought it lacked a bit of realism, so I used dynamic mapping to create a fake wind-blown wheat wave effect by connecting normal nodes. Make the grass look more realistic.

In addition, this week I also tried to build my first scene, using the resources I had found, such as trees, vegetation, rocks, branches, etc., to set up the scene based on the references I had found earlier.

Next week I will continue to work on how to add light effects in Unreal Engine and I will optimize the scene to add more details to achieve the effect we have in mind.

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.