U69 evaluation.

Scenario

3D environment artists create 3D environments for architectural walk-throughs, TV programmes, films, websites and games. The scenery created by these artists includes, for instance, buildings, vegetation and furniture, produced by computers running 3D application software. 3D environment artists are responsible for applying textures to objects and environment items such as the surfaces of walls and floors of buildings. This is a highly-skilled area of work which requires considerable knowledge and understanding of lighting, perspective, materials, colour theory and visual effects.

Competition - CubeBrush | Worlds Challenge

You will be tasked with designing/creating an environment merging the old with the new, choosing either Fantasy or Sci-fi as your dominant genre.

RULES

▶ Pick either Fantasy OR Sci Fi as your dominant genre

▶ The size and scale of your environment is up to you but should clearly incorporate new and old structures/props, in whatever ratio you prefer (up to 90/10 - example: 90% old structures, 10% new structures)

▶ Your environment can be mobile (large ship, floating island, etc) as long as it respects the above

This project was a good start for me getting back into doing 3D modelling and unreal engine 4 as i haven't done much for around a year before this on the subjects. About a week before I started collage I watched this video about how high we can possibly build a building and some of the designs people have come up with.

Fig 1

Then a week or 2 later we had are first day back at collage and I learned about assignment where we had to build ether a Si Fi I or fantastic scene with up to a 90/10 old new or anywhere in between. This was a competition set by CudeBrush sadly I didn’t realise until the end that unless I did regular posts of progress on their site my project would not count. And the first thing I thought of was this video mainly the building in it called the XSEED 4000 and I started thinking of ideas for the rest of the week until we came back to college.

I grouped up with James Clark. And we came up with 3 ideas 2 by me 1 by James.

Idea 1 was a large city scene using the XSEED 4000 as a centre piece surrounded by a large but low detailed city to make a possible 2050 city of sorts.

Idea 2 was a small city street scene where you have a maglev railway going overhead on a viaduct with a street level scene with SIFI cars animated around the scene and high detail buildings blocking of view of a wider city so you do not see the edge of the world.

Idea 3 was some kind of futuristic Bigben.

Personally I did not mind what idea we went with as I wanted to keep my college interested so I let him choice he chose the XSEED 4000 idea. Which was a bit of a shame as I kind of wanted to do my 2nd idea more as it would have been smaller meaning we could have gotten much more detail and made the project a lot higher quality.

To get round the scale and time limit of the project I decided to try and go for a minimalist style meaning assets would be simpler and faster to make. And also this was a good thing so I could relearn 3dsmax and unreal without massive pressure.

Here was the almost finished model of the XSEED I used in the project. I could have done this a lot better by making sure the lines where more straight sadly I didn’t notice I messed up the model a bit until later in the project though this was not too noticeable it still bugged me. Once I finished the model I moved it into unreal engine 4 which I used to exploit its very powerful lighting tools and easy texturing.

I made a terrain to experiment with scale and to do the basic shape of the environment. As I decided on putting the XSEED 4000 on an island just off from the main city.

Once I done that I made the first draft of the bridge and made some of the buildings without textures to start building the city to see how it will look. To place the buildings to save time I used the foliage tool which was very helpful for speed but did make it look not as good as it could but I personally don’t think I would have the time to place them manually. I also started trying to texture the XSEED.

Next I decided to make a image in Photoshop to practice and to get ideas for how i want the skybox to look. The smudge tool was very useful

I was very happy with this however I was never able to get my skybox to look as good but was still good practice.

After this I started texturing the ground and other assets. James made the textures for the city buildings. Sadly the textures on the city buildings were too high res and were very bugging with the aeroscopicfiltering. also the ground texture did not look as good as I wanted it too it was very blocky and I think because I painted the city buildings with the foliage tool the emissive textures on them did not light up the ground. Which made it look pretty bad up close. I also made the first take on the skybox which came out ok but was not great in some places.

I also started work on the fly through animation which is the first I’ve ever done in unreal engine 4 if I did this again I probably design the scene around the animation to make it look as good as possible by adding roads and more hand placed objects along its path this may give the illusion of more detail overall which may have made a large difference on the overall presentation.

I then begun improving the lighting first by changing it from preview to production quality as well as tweaking some textures and adding reflections to the water as well as trying to make the ground reflect some of the light of the city buildings though that didn’t turn out as well due to the issues I mentioned earlier with the buildings which I hadn’t realised at this point in making this. I also made the final version of the skybox which is pretty happy with.

I then fixed up the bridge model and added emissive lighting to it and got rid of the lights I put on there before had and done more lighting tweaks I also took on board some suggestions from Emilio and added balloons to the scene and a flashing light on top of the XSEED 4000. Sadly with the later I wanted to make it flash red but could not find out how to change its colour though it still looked nice white. I also added a directional light that looked like a sun just going under the horizon which came about as a happy accident when me and Emilio where trying to find out how to change the colour and Emilio accidentally added a directional light which we did get rid of but I then added a new 1 after and tweaked it a bit to fit in better. I also was messing around with bloom settings as well to make it look nicer however I did set it too high but ran out of time to turn it down.

I did try and add clouds to the scene but was never able to get them to a place I was happy with and I ran out of time to add them if I did this again I would look more into volumetric clouds though as they would have been great for this to give a sense of scale and to make it look more alive.

Overall is happy with the product I produced but wish I gone for something smaller which would have been far better overall. However it’s a shame that my project was not able to be counted for the competition but was good to use as a benchmark of other people.

references

Fig 1 . Reallifelore (25th Aug 2017) What's the Tallest Thing We Can Possibly Build? (internet) [accessed 2017]

the competitions CubeBrush. (2017) Worlds challenge http://forums.cubebrush.co/t/worlds-challenge/3537 [accessed: September 2017]