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Category: Emily – Unreal Engine

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

UE Assignment – Cabin in Woods

Brief

As part of the term 1 VFX fundamental course, we are instructed to construct an environment scene in UE5. The theme is cabin in the woods. The process for this assignment would be:

  1. Look for references
  2. Block out the scene
  3. Add materials and look dev
  4. Import models
  5. Scatter vegetation(tress and plants)
  6. Setting cinematic cameras
  7. Additional elements
  8. Render image sequences

References

I went online to look for some references to give context what a cabin in the woods would look like. I plan to add an additional element of water in my scene. I imagine my cabin would be positioned beside a body of water such as a lake.

Blocking

I moved on to blocking out my scene. The concept would be to have mountains/hills as the background. The cabin itself would be by a pond and surrounded by trees. The big cubes represent the mountain, the cylinders are trees( the quantity is TBD). The white plane is the pond/lake and the small box will be the cabin.

Look Dev/Materials

I tested the animated water surface material. For the lake surface, it would be darker and slightly green beside on references.

Lake material
Adding all the materials

Importing 3D assets

Next would be importing the 3d models of the cabin together with the textures.

Cabin model

Vegetation

Afterwards, I proceed with the scattering of trees. Both the water plants and trees are hand painted in the scene using foilages in UE5.

Adding Camera

After completing the scene, the next step would be to frame my camera angles. I tested some angles which I find aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Elements

Lastly, I added two additional 2 elements in my scene to make it more interesting.

Final Result

Reflection

Overall, this is a short and fun project to do. Quixel bridge definitely made the whole process a lot faster as very little modelling is needed for this project. UE5’s real time render is really fast and realistic(ish). The most challenging part would working with the shadows and the lighting. I wasn’t pleased with the initial render and had to color correct in the post using Nuke.

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

27/11 UE5 Movie Render Queue

Offline rendering solution

Supports batch rendering, and multiple jobs

Need to enable the plugins

Render in image sequences due to the many advantages over video format

Less compression, no interlacing, and more information rendered in each frame

Stable, convenient and time efficient.

Aliasing in CGI

Deferred Rendering vs Forward Rendering

Color Spaces – a set of parameters which define the color capabilities of a particular device stored in a digital file.

Currently the newest is ACES

MRW window

Add in sequence to the queue

Each job will encompass its own configuration

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

30/10 Landscape Material, Water & Foliage

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

23/10 UE 5 Materials II, Landscapes

Material Instancing

Master Material and Material instancing

Pros and Cons of Material instancing Workflow

Material instances are derivatives of the original master materials with exposed parameters for the artist to tweak further.

Right-click convert to parameters.

Need to implement proper naming to define the corresponding parameters.

Texture LODs, Mips

Different LODs of texture map as well.

Known as Mip.

Texture resolution with LODs helps to optimise the scene.

Texture resolution comes in sizes which are powers of 2.

Sometimes image texture can be layered and contain multiple data layers inside the different color channels.

Landscapes

INPUT CONTENT HERE

Reflection

INPUT REFLECTION HERE

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

16/10 – UE5 Materials I

Introduction to materials

  • PBR workflow
    • Base Colour
    • Roughness
    • Metallic
    • AO
    • Normal
    • Height/Displacement
  • UV Texturing/Unwrapping
  • PBR master material & material instancing

UE5’s material system is like most DDCs which is a node-based system.

Common nodes:

  • math nodes
  • Constants
  • Texture nodes
  • Function/Parm
  • Coordinates

In PBR, roughness is rough for a value of 1 and shiny is 0.

We created 4 basic materials:

  1. Master base
  2. Glass
  3. Chrome
  4. Emissive

IOR is index of refraction which is the angle at which light ray bends when entering surface.

Master and Instanced material. Instance materials build upon master master materials to increase performance.

However, often we need to plan and organise the materials.

MIs can be derived from master materials using parameters.

Mipmaps are like LODs for geometries, its the same texture but adapts resolution according to camera view.

Texture map formats:

In games, mutliple maps are stacked to different color channels.

Progress for Cabin in Woods

  • Found some reference images for cabin in the woods for my UE5 project.
  • Blocking layout for Cabin in the Woods, this is my blocking for my UE level

BLOCKING IMAGE HERE

REFERENCE IMAGES HERE

I will need to apply what I learnt about shaders and use it to apply some materials to my cabin as well as my lake will need some shaders as well.

Reflections

Material and Shading is a very important concept for CG artist to understand. I am glad Emily covered it in detail. She mainly went through the PBR (Physically based rendering) workflow. She also mentioned some tips and tricks to apply material and shaders in UE5. Hopefully I can apply what was taught to my cabin in woods project and make my scene more realistic. The nodes system in UE5 is familiar to other rendering softwares which mostly uses nodes system as well. So I did not struggle much with understanding the core concept of materials in UE5. The concept of material instancing however, is new, and I need some time to understand. I will need to look into it further. Also I will need to look into NPR(non physical rendering).

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Emily - Unreal Engine Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

09/10/2023 – 3D modelling in Maya, Asset Gathering and UE5 Modelling Tools

We need to model a hot air balloon as it will be used for a class assignment with Gonzalo for composition class in the coming weeks.

Using reference images, we model the air hot balloon so that we can use it for our compositing assignment.

Concepts of modelling technique used:

extrude, edge loop, inset, and soft/weight transformation,

Reflections

Since I have not touched modeling for some time. I feel quite rusty with the software. But after awhile, it gradually came back to me and I was able to model a hot air balloon as requested. As part of the nuke assignment, I think the next step will be to UV unwrap it and apply textures for rendering. I look forward to the next modeling class with Manos as we will be covering organic modeling with Zbrush.

Emily’s Class

Asset Gathering in UE5

Need to enable the various plugins that support the file formats to be imported into UE5.

Sketchfab.com is a good place for 3D models but caution the copyright rules.

Models need to follow the proper naming conventions so that the correct material IDs can be assigned.

Modeling in UE5

Unreal DOES NOT support quads or N-gons so all models will be triangulated.

Nanite in UE5 supports VERY high poly counts such as photo scans or Zbrush sculpts.

Reflections

Today we learnt a bit of modelling with UE5. Although, UE5 can do modeling, I feel that maybe it is not the best tool for the job as I feel that it is missing some of the features that the other software has. Perhaps it would be better to just model in other DCCs and import it to UE5 for layout and rendering. But it is comforting to know that UE5 does allow for simple geometry editing.

Homework:

  • Find references for cabin in the woods, and relevant small environments
  • Also, need to block out the environment for the UE5 assignment
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Emily - Unreal Engine Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

02/10/2023 – Intro to Modeling, Unreal Engine 5 Workshop (Quixel Bridge)

Manos’ Class

Basic Maya interface navigation.

Basic modeling techniques. Rotation, Translation, Scale in Maya.

Poly bevel, Poly extrude.

Emily’s Class

Introduction to UE5:

Advantages: Real-time, High fidelity (relatively), flexible workflow

Uses:

  • Game Dev
  • Arch Vis
  • Training & Sims
  • Film & TV
TV/Film Pipeline

UE5 is used in VFX

  1. LED Wall Cinematography
  2. Projection Screen Cinematography
  3. Eg. Mandalorian

UE5 Course Content Page

  1. Introduction
  2. Asset gathering and Quixel Library
  3. Creating and Editing Static Meshes
  4. Materials, Textures and UV
  5. Landscapes, Foliage and Water Systems
  6. Lighting, Atmospheric, and PPV
  7. Cameras, PPV, and Sequencer
  8. Rendering and Movie Render Queue (MRQ)
  9. Niagara Particles
  10. Blueprints and Visual Scripting

Basic UE5 interface and operations

Reflections:

Today is first day of school and it was nice meeting the 2/3 of the lecturers. It was also a pleasure getting introduced to the classmates for my course. We did a bit of introduction to the two main software that we need to learn for this term. It wasn’t very difficult as I already understand some of the basics of 3D.

Manos taught a bit of the basics of Maya, I modeled a snowman, but I deleted in at the end of the class so I did not have a screenshot of it.

Emily introduce us to the basic pipeline of VFX and the real life applications of UE 5 in VFX. She proceed to teach us the basic navigation of UE5.