Category: Visual Immersion – Year 2

The Big Building! Its time has come.

Now to conclude the texturing saga, its time for me to take the big hub, the main building in my whole environment, and give it colour. As I mentioned when I first started texturing these assets for this project, I wanted to leave the biggest for last, and that I have done. Unlike the gate, I did not join all the seperate geometry, as that would’ve been a nightmare to detail properly, as well as quite the hellish UV map I’d recon, so I opted to keep them separate. This is what we’re starting with!

Now, I wanted to start with the roof, and I was initially confused as to what I was going to do texture wise for it, until week 3 me had quite politely told future me what to do.

So its glass! I cannot believe I forgot that was the plan for it, and i’m glad I remembered! Luckily since the tunnels are full glass, I am able to just slap the same glass texture on the roof, considering its not got any details, its really simple and there should be no complications with how it looks!

It looks quite mesmerising in my opinion, very sleek, very clean design. But now I have to tarnish and do damage to the rest of the building, I need to keep the roof clean.

With all the other parts of the building, I followed a really similar approach to the rest of my buildings, however I wanted to make more effort to use more alphas and even text using paintalongpath, considering my masking still never worked. Heres a quickfire of most of the other parts, but I will leave a whole space for the mainbuilding.

And now, for the main magnum opus, the main component itself:

I had a lot of fun working on this, I am so happy my work around for alphas turned out to be so effective, also the little logo/imprint or sign on the left, was really interesting to make, it was hard but paths are surprisingly effective when it comes to alphas, no need for masks and they are still fully customisable, as each path has individual brush settings, if you want to scale it up you can change the brush size and it will work perfectly. I also had fun putting the heart, diamond, club and spade alphas on the tunnel entrances, added a little bit more depth and classification to the components of the structure.

Now lets see how it looks, fully assembled! Alongside with some lighting trials

Concluding the construction of my building, its time for me to spend the last remaining days I have for this deadline to tweak my render settings, add some lighting and see if there are any other details that I can paint over, I remember my lecturers mentioned that for my final render I should paintover a small person-esk figure so that I can demonstrate the scale of my world.

Here’s all the assets before the rendering process!

Rendering!!!!

Now at this stage, all I have is blender to my renderings, as I dont think I can get everything into unreal within such a short amount of time. So I will use Cycles for my main renders, Ill take one in the lower resolution .blend and one in the higher resolution .blend. Only current problem is that my PC doesn’t have enough RAM to load all my textures in rendered view for the high-resolution. So I have ordered some in hopes that it will be enough for the renders to load. Things are getting quite tight time wise. Meanwhile here is some render tests I have been doing in secret throughout the past few weeks!

Quite happy with these, but I know for a fact that I can do better, more lighting for sure, although I am really impressed with the stylized look, I think its been pulled off quite effectively!! I also had a lot of fun with putting lights in the tunnels, as they refracted in a really really cool way that caught my eye.

These are my current renders for low res.blend:

I think the lighting is a bit underwhelming personally, however, the scene looks INCREDIBLY stylized, which im so happy about as that is sorta what I wanted to do with this project, I really really enjoy having the stylized look, I feel it fits with my personal look so well, and it is very fufilling to see it in the state that it is.

Here is the renders for high-res .blend!!! (note I had to buy more RAM to render these, and I also accidently ordered the wrong RAM the first time :))

SURPRISE!!!!!!!

I got everything into unreal. Yep, I managed to import literally everything into unreal, and rebuild my scene, with absolutely no issues what-so-ever; is it a miracle? Yes, am I happy? Incredibly. I had previous experience with UE4 but this was the first time that I would be using UE5 for something, and honestly, it has to be one of the most efficient pieces of software that I have ever used, period. My rawfbxs when imported were materialised, the only thing I had to change was the metalic and roughness maps as they were incorrectly assigned on the material, and add the displacement using a new unique UE5 feature where you can deform meshes based on Displacement Maps, very cool stuff. Heres an insight on the building of things:

Even with just the basic lighting effects that came with the package, the lighting quality is incredible, and quite literally everything that I dreamed of it being. Everything just slid into place so perfectly, and it was so so exciting to see this unfold beneith my eyes. The skybox was an interesting case, originally I installed the HDRI Skyscape plugin and used a raw sphere with a material I made for the skybox in to bake a texture cube that I could then use on this plugin to change my skybox, until I clicked on SkyAtmosphere, and then just changed the material to the skybox one I imported in from blender. Much learnings.

A lot of lighting was needed to achieve my look, and I fiddled with a bunch of new settings: fog, pointlights, beamlights, spotlights, skybox intensity, fogintensity and depth, all of which I’ll show you here!

Camera Settings!

To render, I need to format my camera in a specific way to get the shots that I want to get, I specifically Chose a 16:9 Digital Film, with a 2.39 crop, that way it looks incredibly cinematic, and even has the black bars on the top and bottom. Making use of the render pipeline using CineActors was quite strenuous, but proved to be effective, until I found out about High-Res Screenshot.

Now whilst I still needed a camera setup to take the High-Res screenshot, it still is quite funny to me that I can just make use of a screenshot feature to get an exact same quality render, and much much quicker also. I guess if I was animating or using a NiagraSystem particles, then I would need to video render. Unreal’s cameras also feature Bloom settings, which was really useful for coordinating and getting better control of my lighting for the shots that I needed.

I made sure specifically to make extensive use of the FocalLength feature and BloomIntensity setting, as with my crop being widescale, it allowed me to zoomout so my objects fit, whilst also gaining a higher level of depth from the wide scenery.

You may also see some first attempts at renders from the CineActor image! I shall supply those here, note I had made use of bare minimum lighting, and was strictly in Lit view.

However, for a start, I think these look so much better compared to the renders that I got with blender, and it also didn’t cost anywhere near the amount of resources that blender (cycles) needed to produce these results. After I equip it with more lighting and get some feedback from people I feel way more confident in the end result here.

Render Part 2!!!!

These are the first attempts at rendering my scene in unreal! I made use of Lit perspective, and had the same camera format as I mentioned previous. Overal there is 9 different files for each, but I’ll only be presenting the main ones here.

Now at this stage, I was already incredibly happy with these results, the other 2 files were one with black cinematic bars, and one without but in 1920×1080 format, as these images above are 1472 x 616.

Now, I didn’t realise this until right at the end of production, but DetailedLighting viewport, made such a difference for a few of my render images. It helped brighten them up greatly, and also provided way more clarity into the depth of my scene, as friends had mentioned previously that my scene was too dark (based on the ones above) resulting in a lack of detail being shown.

So, in turn with this criticism, I did exactly that: I adjusted the EV value of the significant lights in the scene, turned up BloomIntensity settings on cameras, messed around with directional light, and also fog settings, topping it all off with the DetailedLighting setting. So now!!! At last!!! I present the final base renders for Visual Immersion!!!

The main renders that got the effect from the change to DetailedLighting was renders 1 and 2, the CityPerspective and the GatePerspective, the others didn’t fit as well with the DetailedLighting unfortunately, but I was still super happy with the result. I think render 3 I chose to be default Lit due to the glowy blue effect on the glass being removed in DetailedLighting mode.

Post Processing!!!

Only 1 render of mine recieved post processing, and that was the Overview of the buildings from the canyon, as I wanted to add a little bit of story to the scene in the form of a character, but one that doesn’t explain much, and leaves the viewer up to interpretation.

Personally, im stuck between this perspective and the gate one, I do really like the two city-based renders, but these in my opinion tell the most story to me.

Reflective Feelings

Despite its length, I’ve genuinely enjoyed this project, it allowed me to be incredibly free when it came to 3D and I really enjoy having that freedom, especially with style. I learned so much about 2 amazing softwares, and whilst there was a third I tried to learn, it may be a bit too much for me in the current time. At the same time, I would be lying if I said things went super smooth, there were a lot of delays, mainly due to me feeling intimdated by new software. However! I got over it, and produced something that I am genuinely proud of!

Heres two GAANT charts, the top representing what I had planned to do with my time, and the latter displaying what eventually did happen with my time. Whilst I was really good with modelling, concept and start of texture, I spent way too long texturing and blocking out, resulting in a crunch for lighting, and render, considering I didn’t even really get a chance to do a simple animation in this project.

Its saddening that I fell to crunch again for this project, but its really hard for me to keep consistant with my progress, I’ll try my best in the next up and coming projects due to both of them being group projects.

Thank you for reading my whole blog, it was a fun journey, and im sorry this week has been so long, it was just the final push! Till I see you next time!!!!

The Gate!

After texturing all the smaller buildings and assets, it was time to tackle the big assets, starting with the gate, one of the main features of my planned renders and overall environment, and I had a lot of fun texturing it, whilst it looks similar to the housing buildings due to the palette, I tried to format it like I did in the thumbnailing for it, largest parts are the brightest, smallest parts are the darkest.

Geometry wise, the Gate is split into two parts; GateFoundation, and GateOverlay, with there being side panels that are completely different geometry and a GlassLamp. Before I was actually able to texture these, I needed to re-UV unwrap it, as all the parts of the final model were different unlinked geometry, so I joined them and re-UV’ed, even if the geometry was unjoined, here is how they look!

When all combined, it looks like this!

Render Tests!

At this stage, I needed to start playing around with my render options so that I could get the best outcome for my immersive environment, I already had a few angles previously that I had referenced here, but considering mostly everything at this point is textured, I needed to see how everything looked.

This was the flat render I got when I rendered without any lighting, except the world light, and it looks, meh. So I experimented with a bit of lighting and created a little lamp thingy, to project my lighting better. I also decided to try and lower the strength of the world light, so that the new lights I put in place could be more apparent and even suffice as a focal point for the viewer.

I am a lot happier with this version, there still could be a few tweaks for it, and I probably will paintover with some extra effects/lighting to improve this render, I may experiment with framing in the limited time I have at the moment, shall have to see. At the same time, I don’t think im going to be able to get this into unreal engine by the time the deadline arrives. I will most likely do that after submission, just to see how it could’ve looked, but there is no way I can get it sorted by the deadline unfortunately. So I will solely have to rely on blender Cycles and post processing to get the most amount of detail possible in this piece.

Until then, in Week 15, its building time.

Quickfire Building Textures!

As mentioned last week, I found a texture structure that I really enjoyed using for creating my buildings textures, so this week, I just followed the same process, and went full quickfire on making them, here is what I managed to do!

They all look quite similar, which I am incredibly happy about, as that is exactly what I hoped to achieve when it came to making my buildings, all of them looking similar, whilst each having unique quirks infatuated my ideas and belief in my aesthetic for this project! I think the arrows and carbon fibre look help to achieve a stylised look in my opinion.

Optimisation!

Ok so during this time, I made the mistake of exporting all my textures in 4k resolution, and whilst that ran fine on my pc at home, my laptop was struggling hard to compile all the shaders on launch, so I copied my project and made a version where all the textures are exclusively 1080p, just incase I need to made adjustments or renders on there. I also opted to making a folder of 2k textures, as there were some cases were 4k was just not needed, e.g. the tunnel, or the supports for the tunnels.

All the folders but rawspp files support this layout of management, which has helped sososos much in keeping all my texture work organised, and im really happy I layed everything out this way, as it has helped me and saved so much time in navigating through my texture application process, especially considering that all the raw texture files have the header DefaultMaterial, I managed to avoid any form of overwriting by doing this.

Whilst not as detailed as Week 12, a lot has been done this week, I’m planning on tackling the gate and the main building of the piece in the next week, as well as including some work regarding rendering. Unfortunately the deadline for this project is fast approaching (for me), so I am not entirely sure that I’ll be able to get stuff into Unreal at this stage, but I will try my hardest to get it done! If I cant, ill simply have to make sure the quality of my blender renders is impecable.

See you in Week 14!

Glass & Tunnel – a fun combo!

Starting off the new year, comes textures to buildings, at last! I wanted to work my way towards the harder buildings to texture, so instinctively, I started with the glass tunnel as a tunnel of glass is always a pivotal way to convince viewers that futurism is a concept in this enviroment. Luckily for me, substance painter has a glass smart material that worked wonders! I opted to using that over blenders Glass BSDF as if I wanted to add any more details to the glass, I could be able to do that without issue.

Now this glass tunnel also included the supports, as I feel going for a whole glass look to really reaaaaally push the futurism.

To get my glass to actually be seethrough or opaque, there were a few settings I had to change, mainly, changing alpha settings to allow light to passthrough the texture, both in the actual node settings itself and in additional viewport settings for the texture.

With these settings tweaked! It now means the glass is seethrough and will also display that way in the final render, including be able to see the other objects and their textures through it, wonderful! Also during this process, my lecturer gave me some criticisms about the whole tunnel and supports being made of glass. Whilst yes it was futuristic, it also seemed a bit tacky, so I decided to separate the supports from the tunnel model, and I took them all into substance painter at once to give them a really strong look. I went for a strong black as the base colour, and made use of a smart mask to add height to the object, giving it that damaged look.

I’m a massive fan of how you can disable base colour and only enable options such as height and normal, or even metallic, it really added a whole new layer of depth to my understanding of substance painter, and I really hope to make greater use of it throughout the rest of this project. I’m very optimistic about what I can do for these models.

A Flat and a Bore

Straight after I had finished texturing the tunnels, came the texturing of the big block of flats that I had created, and tried really hard to make look as futuristic as possible. For my main buildings, like the terrain, I have a specific colour palette that I am making use of, as I feel these colours do represent the futurism type, and are all sleak colours in their own way.

I also learnt that before you do anything in regards to texturing a model, you need to bake that model in substance, so it can determine the values of all the edittable functions, such as normal, world space normal, height, thickness, etc. I personally find the baking screen quite mesmerising.

Whilst texturing this building, theres one tool that completely changed everything for texturing, and that is polyfill. Polyfill made it so that I could accurately plan the shifts in colour for my building, as well as organise the shapes I wanted to create based off my UV map, it saved me so much time and grief as supposed to hand painting features, and even then it could’ve looked off.

I was incredibly happy with how effective and efficient it was at making the basecolour process feel, however I dont think I could’ve used this tool for the terrain base colour, that needed to be hand painted. As for this though, worked like a charm.

Continuing on from the basecolour, I wanted to experiment with using alphas to add more specific details and colours to my texture. However, I was unable to use it with a mask sadly, I’m not exactly sure as to why it didn’t allow me to properly use a masked alpha, so I had to resort to other methods, including a paint along path brush that drew my alpha in a straight line as I wanted it to be, and it actually turned out better than if I was doing it with masks.

Now finally, came all the normals, height, bump, materially textury look and all that to finalise the look of the fancy flats that had been ridden with decay. The plating look also comes from a smart material! Carbon fibre: I removed the base colour, normal and metallic feature of it, and made sure to assign its mask to base colour, that way the height still influences the texture, but it looks flat and more like plating as supposed to an exterior additive.

Overall, quite happy with this! and I learned an absolute ton about substance painter working on this, I am going to apply this same process to all the other buildings I am making as it was quick, efficient and honestly quite fun to work like that, so I shall apply it to all the other buildings I am going to work on, in differing styles and matters.

I also managed to texture the tunnel systems that go into the sides of the canyon terrain, I had a different approach to that, I did a more painted shtick for it of the darker colours in the palette, and I didn’t add the carbon fibre material to it, as it already looked quite metallic, sorta like camoish at the same time too, very industrialised look compared to the flats.

Quite a lot of work done for this week, and a lot of things that I have learnt from my substance painter findings! I will continue to expand on these in the coming weeks I recon, hoping to quickfire through the rest of the buildings so I can move onto rendering! See you in Week 13!

Colourful Cliffs!

The last week of term, and learning from my process of texturing my main terrain plate, it was time to do the same for the cliffs that surround the baseplate where the gate is! Making a fully closed area with layered cliffs I feel helps add to the depth of my scene, so now it was time to texture those cliffs.

I followed the same process as I did for the terrain and made use of the same colour palette, did layers for each base colour then painted over it with similar or equivalent colours of lighter and darker proportion and used smudge to blend it all together, top if off with some canyon markings and lines, a bit of height map and a stylized rock mask, and boom, cliffs made.

As you can see, they all look pretty similar, and follow the same type of pattern as the terrain does, considering I was quite happy with how the terrain went, I felt more than comfortable replicating that for the other surrounding cliffs. Now to view them in blender!

Skybox!

As you can see slightly in the image showing off the terrain, the background is sorta purpley, and that is for a reason! I decided to make use of a skybox I had previously created for a commission, as it never got used in the final product and it was a perfectly good skybox that I could use! An amazing feature with blender is that you can use painted .exr files or pngs to control the lighting of the scene in rendered view, therefore when it comes to me planning my final renders, I would already have the world lighting under control!

It can be seen more thoroughly in this screenshot!

I may see if I can try and adjust the scaling of it to fit better overall, but if I am unable to thats fine. If you notice the Strength option near the bottom right in my world settings, that is the bar I make use of to control the light influence my skybox has on the scene, its incredibly easy to adjust so it allows me to explore a bunch of different lighting settings with ease when it comes to my renders.

As this is the last week of the school year, I will see you in the next blog, starting January 2024, and Week 12, merry christmas and happy new year!

It’s time for COLOUR!

Finally! Its time to get into Substance Painter and make my assets; textured assets! My approach on this will be entirely a new experience for me, whilst I did sorta mingle with it last year in character creation, I had no clue what I was doing there, and in the end resulted to doing it in Blender, but not this time! Blender cannot provide what I need for this project. I’m going with a heavy stylized look, that I can only perform in Painter, whilst I tried Designer, it was not worth the 2 weeks I spent trying to learn it in the end.

For my basecolour, I was going with a pastelle colour palette, and I also wanted it to be heavily painted, so I sought out for some colours. Any other colours I use will be derivatives of this palette, as I am planning on making use of the smudge tool to blend the terrain together. I am heavily inspired by desert canyons and their use of intertwining oranges, yellows and pinks.

Now to give insight into my painted process for my stylized look!

From this, I decided to add lines running across the main crevice of the terrain, to help signify the colours and add to the look that I was trying to achieve of desert canyon. As well as this, I also brushed over a height to make it feel rocky, surprisingly I made use of a tree bark brush I found, and surprisingly it delivered the result that I was looking for!

After the painting process, it was time to import into blender! Now for optimisation reasons, I’m going to have 3 folders for textures, a 1080p res, 2k res and 4k res folder, as I cannot slap a ton of 4k textures into blender and expect things to run smoothly, so having a variety will help my project actually run so I can render it for the finale.

Now to see how it looks in blender!

With the biggest part of my project textured, I feel so excited to see colour in my blender project at last! Its such an incredibly refreshing change and I learned so much using substance this week, I am very very hopeful for the last 4 weeks of this project to make a ton of textures and have fun with it, till week 11!

Normals!

Starting off Week 9, making sure all my normals on my objects are facing the right way! If they’re not, it makes texturing in substance painter an absolute nightmare, so its time to make sure they’re all facing the right way to make the texturing process that much easier.

Now from this perspective, everything should be blue, because we are looking purely at the outsides of objects and not the insides, blue = outside, red = inside, heres an example of an object I flipped normals on this week.

Note how all the red is inside, and the blue is outside the faces, this process is done by me selecting the faces and using ALT+N to recalculate the normals inside or outside, depending on which one I select. This process needs to be applied to every object that has red on it. Usually I wouldn’t know where to start, but blender has a viewport option that allows you to see the face orientation (normals) of all the objects.

More UV’s!

Since I spent last week UV’ing terrain, now it was time to make sure my models were fully ready for texturing by UV’ing my polymodelled assets.

For some of my models, I made use of smart UV ONLY, as some models were too expensive to my time to fully UV, for example the flats, as I could’ve UV’ed the base one before I copied it over, but I didn’t do that, so Smart UV was my next best option, having models ready for Substance was the goal of this week, so next week I aim to start texturing assets! See you in week 10!

The Final Modellings!

Week 8 is here! Currently I am looking into trying to finalize my models for the environment, as time is coming on short to texture and impliment all that I have created into engine, I may outsource furnatures and objects for the interiors of houses, as I am running out of time, or simply close off all the homes with doors. This week, I made sure to enclose my entrance of the environment, so that players cant essentially walk off the map or go anywhere else other than the main source of the map, and added one more building/flat design, akined to current day london flats, but modernised and way more square.

Heres what they look like when incorportated with the rest of the buildings made from previous weeks.

A problem I have just realised is that I didn’t UV any of the houses or objects before copying them into the scene, so as a result of this I’ll probably have to adjust the scene and remove the objects so that I can UV them and have those UV’s copy over when im placing them in the scene, as to avoid having to UV the same object multiple times. I also realise this is a problem when it comes to the main building, as it is a mirror of 4 quarters. I’ll look into a way of which I can try and transfer UV’s across objects.

UV Progress!

During this week I also started working on UV’s for some of my objects, including the gate and terrain. Terrain is something that is a bit harder to UV using seams, but I plan to separate the canyons into 4 parts, essentially quartering the whole mesh, so that its easier for blender to decipher how to UV it. I made use of both Smart UV and Regular Unwrap to see what worked best, personally I feel that the regular unwrap outclasses the Smart UV, despite the fact that it doesn’t fill the uv map.

Reason I say that the regular unwrap is better due to the detail it captures on the faces of the canyons, as supposed to the assorted details that the smart UV catches.

You can see all the verticies and its in one combined block, and there are 4 of them to display all of the faces and their details, as supposed to the smart UV taking bunches of the canyon and spreading them out, this is more uniform. There are also no faces on the underneith of the object so thats what the gap makes up for. The mountains at the start of the terrain however are a different case. Those have to be just smart UV’ed with no seams, as its hard to detemine where I would need to seam due to the Z axis scaling needed to make them mountains.

This is all the progress of week 8! Next week, ill be focussing on objects and discussing my plans for texturing, I also realise now I have the duty to make sure my normals will be facing the right way in preporation for taking my models into substance painter, see you in week 9!

More Buildings!

During week 7, my main focus was to design more buildings to put towards making my environment feel real and abandonded. To do this, I wanted to create buildings akined to future accomodation, but have them merge in with the canyon to give that display of wreckage. I designed 3 base buildings, making exclusive use of poly-modelings and face extrusion to keep the blocky-sleak feel, also making use of bevel to give edges more oomph.

The building on the left most is essentially a garage-one story house combination, the middle is a set of flats (4) and the right is a standardised house, with power supplies attached to the side of the house. All of them feature a top where its essentially an X, to try and give it some branding ideology. I had scattered these around the base terrain in front of the main travel hub to give the space between the gate entrance and the travel hub feel populated.

Substance Designer!

Also at this time, I wanted to prepare for the texturing process, so I took on a tutorial for substance designer, as I wanted to learn the node like approach to textures. I mainly wanted to do this due to the fact that I can import them into designer as smart materials, making application to my models much much easier than if I was to just paint it by hand.

The most basic tutorial I had on it, was creating cracked tiles, so that I was starting to understand features such as edge detect, and tile generators so see how I can adjust and mess around with things to get to a result.

This was a good start for me, however I don’t feel ill use this texture in the final result, my next texture however, I can argue otherwise.

This is also a tutorial texture I was following, however I have decided to take the normal maps and the height maps from this texture, and just create a paintover mask in substance painter, considering the colour palette im going to follow would be quite hard for me to achieve in substance designer, so I feel its appropriate for me to move to painter to continue on this texture.

This is all for week 7! im going to look at UV’ing my assets and doing a bit more research into texturing methods. See you then!

More Landscape!!!

Considering I extended the landscape further across, i wanted to also scale it width ways as well, considering if I needed to take a high level shot in the sky, there could be the chance of more gray-space, killing the sense of immersion in my environment. So what I did was copy the two landscapes as it, then sculpt and proportionally edit them to look different. Originally I had tried generating new onces and combining them, but I was struggling with the scales as I couldn’t remember them and it caused a lot of chaos with my verticies and objects.

If you look close enough as well, you may also notice some buildings emerging from the sides of the canyon, as well as some pillars pertruding out from the tunnels, lets take a closer look at these!

Building Improvements & Details!

As you can see, they are quite big structures that create more general connection to the central hub building, but don’t actually look as big in the terrain. Im quite happy that this is the case due to the ideology that it really can give the essence of abandonment to the scene that im picturing to have for my final renders. Now a difficult feature of the process is I don’t necessarily get to look much into making stuff look abandonded until I reach texturing stages and engine stage.

Within the next week or so, blender’s 4.0 update will release, and i’m hoping to make use of features such as geometry tools (creating custom tools out of geometry node trees) to help with modelling, and maybe even adding detail to my structures.

Week 6 was quite tame in comparison to other weeks, but its ok that its like that every now and then, I look foward to showing you more updates in Week 7!