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Tag: Emily Sakai

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VFX Fundamentals

Term 1 Final Video Assignment

Ideation

#1 Space Battle

The scene shows beauty shots of large spaceships to introduce scale. Then it shows the deployment of smaller fighter ships going to battle formation. All of these build up to the climax where enemy ships jump in from hyperspace and start to attack and deploy their own ships. This leads up to the high point of tension where we cut because there is no time and budget to do the actual space battle.

#2 Perfume Advertisement

This idea was to try out motion design coupled with VFX. I wanted to try this because I feel like given the time frame of the assignment it would be interesting to explore. Since the intensity will increase as we progress. It is better to do something more ambitious and make mistakes early on.

So the idea was to create an abstract and moody commercial that showcases a uniquely designed perfume bottle.

#3 Chocolate Ice-cream Commercial

#4 Car Commercial

Conclusion

In the end, I went with #2.

Mood board & References

References from Pinterest
AI-generated
AI-generated

FX References

0:10
0:08

Lighting Mood board

Mood Reel

Storyboard

3D Model

Initial Designs
Refine with a better silhouette
Inner geometry, gold frame and cap
Final

Look Dev Materials

Final Concept

Styleframes

s01
s01b_v4
s02
s03 start
s03 end
s04a
s04b
s05

Animations

Animation is not my strong suit, I need more practice. But I tried my best to follow the mood reel’s animation. However, I feel that overall the animation is the biggest problem in this project.

Especially the cut after the bottle’s emergence is very glaring. If there is more time, I would need to rethink how to better transit. Though I could simply merge those two shots into one continuous shot. However, due to the lack of time, I just did a cut as they are simulated separately.

Overall, the pacing is a little fast for my liking, I feel like a lot of the shots can be dragged out. That being said, I do like the last transition from the close-up to the end scene. That one feels smoother and I am happy with it.

FX

For FX, this is the part I love the most and want to improve. It consists of mainly two simulations; (1) Rigid Body Dynamics and (2) Pyro (Smoke).

Having an art-directed fracture is the foundation for both simulations. I employed both procedural and manual boolean slicers to get a fracture that I was satisfied with. In addition, I added interior details in between the fractures.

Fractures
Interior Fracture Details
s02 Node Graph

The smoke simulation is pretty straightforward once the RBD is complete. I just take the pieces where I want smoke to spawn and use them as emitters for my smoke and simply run a smoke sim. viola. The combined FX is shown below.

Compositing

AOV Passes including Light Passes

Compositing is pretty straightforward as well. For me, I like to make my raw render look as good as possible so that I would not have to spend too much time on compositing (a little bit unorthodox I know).

However, sometimes there will still be times when the deadline is very close (like this time) and there isn’t time to rerender. Hence, I always like to output as much information in my render through AOVs so that I have the option to do editing in post-production. (image above).

Also when doing AOV channels, I like to output my light AOVs as well. Having light groups in my render would mean I can adjust my lighting without returning to 3D.

For post-production, I just try to ensure that all my scene colour is consistent. Then I applied an overall colour grade and added some grains.

Sound Design (SFX)

Final Output

Combining everything together after weeks of work, here it is! The final product. Please on sound as there is audio to it as well! Thanks for staying with me until this point. Enjoy

Reflections

Overall this project was a successful one. I learned a lot about the project pipeline. I also realised my weaknesses and strengths. I feel that I would need to improve my animation skills and camera animation. Right now, it is a bit stiff and not dynamic enough. For future projects, I want to try doing another aspect of houdini.

Categories
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.

Categories
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).

Categories
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
Categories
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.