Viet Nhí Tran
General ARtist
Lotus Gazebo
This is an academic project.
My goal is to have a scene presented in Unreal Engine 4 to explore modeling, texturing in Substance Painter, and simple use of lighting and effects. It is logged below.
Photo-bash concept for the general feeling of the piece. While this is generally more stylized, the piece will be done realistically. The lighting was later toned down.
Original Block-Out In Maya to get the general shapes and feel.
Refining geometry and creating variants. With some critique added new structures (poles and bell). Modeling and UV unwrapping was done in Maya, with some Zbrush for the flowers during the highpoly stage.
I began setting up my scene in Unreal Engine 4. I imported a light particle I had previously worked on, and the water material I had created for another project. I changed the settings of my water material and changed some of the material blueprint to suit the type of water I needed for my scene. I tried using the Unreal water shaders, but I found that my own matched the look I was aiming for a little better.
In Substance Painter, I put base materials on all my objects and did some first-past adjustments and fill layering. I then exported the textures and bakes to Unreal to see how they look in the engine.
This is my first lighting pass in Unreal Engine 4. It is quite dark and the objects are not visible yet. I set up planar reflection for the water's surface and prepared the scene for a night time look.
Second pass on the lighting. I also set up reflection capture spheres for reflective surfaces on the surface of the water instead of a planar captures for better resolution. After looking at some reference, I decided to add more light to the scene and make it bluer to still have the feeling of night-time while being visible. I also changed the light direction to come from the front for more clarity of my structure. There is a new rect light in the front of the dome.
I also set up some new cinematic camera to adjust the depth of field and camera lens.
I updated the textures to be a little more detailed and tells more of a story, as well as more varied coloration. I also adjusted textures and the material blueprints to display the materials as intended, such as adding emmissive to the lanterns and adjusting the metallic textures to be more realistic and worn.
Added subsurface and simple grass wind to the foliage for subtle movement. This helps a lot with the visibility of the foliage in the scene, lightening them up, and the appearance of vegetation.
Also added a small bit of subsurface to the marble and jade in the scene, but less than on the foliage.
Found the lanterns quite distracting, so decided to keep them out of the final product. Some things I'd like to change are to make the stars more visible, have some stronger shadows and more interesting angle on the flowers.
I added some point lights and spotlights to create rim lighting on the dome and bell, and some more lights on the flowers. I lowered the overall intensity of the skylight so that the flowers would get more shadow, and added some effects. I increased the roughness on some materials.
This is the final image with post processing!