Week 1 - Forefront Friday: Unreal Engine 4

The forefront of the video game industry can be identified by an array of different artefacts, individuals and processes. I think a good indicator of the forefront is when a technique, process or piece of software changes the way practitioners within the industry create their games. I believe Unreal Engine 4 is one such piece of software.

Throughout this year I have been building my workflow around real time rendering through Unreal Engine 4. As an environment artist I consider this an essential piece of software because it is the primary method I use to display my art. Real time graphics have offered me a new way to interact with my work during production, giving me instant feedback to any creative changes I make meaning I no longer have to wait for a render to finish before I can see the final result of my work. It is largely for this reason that I believe Unreal Engine in particular is at the forefront of not just the games industry but across all areas of 3D visualisation.

Instead of a static image displayed on screen, Unreal Engine offers artists dynamic vantage points displayed in real time. If they find an issue they can then make changes immediately with instant feedback. This is great from a design perspective as artists no longer have to wait for hours at a time to get a new rendering of a proposed change. This emphasis on interaction has played a big part in design firms within the architectural sector turning to real-time technology for visual solutions. From the Unreal Engine blog, Ken Pimentel lists Italian architectural firm Lissoni Associates and Neoscape, a creative agency that focuses on design for real estate, as companies revolutionizing their design process through interactive real-time graphics powered by Unreal Engine. (Pimentel 2018).

Indeed, my main reason for choosing to study at the University of Hertfordshire was that my architecture company was looking to get into real time visualisation using Unreal Engine, and I felt that there was a lot I didn’t know about this field and I could see there were a lot of benefits to using real time rendering. Because of these Unreal Engine’s relevance at the forefront of the field of 3D visualisation is constantly increasing. It has shifted its identity away from being solely known as a tool for game development, to a legitimate means of producing high end visualisations for numerous industries ranging from film to architecture.

The droid from the film Star Wars: Rogue One (2017) was rendered in real time using Unreal Engine, a first for the industry. As real time graphics displays are making it easier for film makers and artists to receive instant feedback from creative decisions, costly render times are also being negated. This coupled with the Engine’s unbeatable price point of completely free, has solidified the software at the forefront of 3D visualisation.

I believe the adoption of Unreal Engine across the different industries of the creative economy is Marshall Mcluhan’s concept of the Global village in action. We are seeing the differences of software and terminology across distinct fields becoming smaller and smaller. This could ultimately change the way we perceive mediums such as film, games and architecture, especially when they are driven by the same technology and methodologies.

PIMENTEL, K. (2018) Moving Beyond the Image: Test Drive Your Visual Designs. [Online] Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/moving-beyond-the-image-test-drive-your-visual-designs [Accessed: 11/06/2018]

POLYGON. (2017). Star Wars: Rogue One’s best character was rendered in real time, a cinema first. Available at: https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14777806/gdc-epic-rogue-one-star-wars-k2so [Accessed: 11/06/2018]

Week 1 - Thursday: Fireplace Asset

I have begun creating the first of what I hope will be many assets, an ornate fireplace for the mansion's entrance hall. Using hard surface transfer techniques within Substance Painter, I will be transferring a high poly fireplace onto a low poly equivalent to simulate detail. This will keep things optimised within Unreal Engine.

 I started by looking at some designs of fireplaces in mansions.

I really love the elongated look of these as their sheer size makes them quite intimidating in appearance. This is a design aspect that I am interested in replicating throughout my scene, as I am aiming to create a sense of grandeur and scale that will be reflected in all the assets of the environment.

Below you can see the high poly model as seen in the 3DS Max viewport:

 The lower portion of the mansion fireplace.

Front orthographic view:

Below you can see the inset hearth that I have treated as a seperate asset because it will be using a different material from the main body:

I also modelled some additional floral details to add some variety to the surface areas of the model:

I created these ornate details within 3DS max. I took my time to make sure the topology was clean, however this was something I could have perhaps not stressed over, as much of these details would only be transferred over to the low poly model. In the future I will most likely reuse these details for other models rather than create more custom details.

Below you can see the low poly model of the fireplace:

I created the model and UV mapped it pretty quickly, however I did encounter a rather frustrating problem when it came to projecting the high poly details onto the model. I found that if certain parts of the model were close together, then Substance Painter would have trouble projecting details onto them. For example the details only meant for a particular surface would bleed onto the ones adjacent to it. To avoid this I had to seperate all the elements of the model and bake the details onto them individually. When this was done I had to bring all the seperate maps into photoshop and manually piece them back together. This took a REALLY long time and I'm trying to find an alternative to doing this for every asset with lots of overlapping details.

You can see how the asset looks so far in Unreal Engine below:

Week 1 - Wednesday: Animation Expose

Today I watched the final year show of the animation, film and game art students. I was extremely impressed with the quality of work that was showcased today and I am both inspired and determined to meet the high standards that they have displayed throughout the show. I was particularly impressed with the cinematic for Kyros which was rendered entirely in Unreal Engine. A large focus of my research throughout this year has been on the viability of Unreal Engine as a legitimate tool for visualisation beyond video games, so I was pleased to see such a great example of this with Kyros.

I also had the opportunity to talk to professionals from the industry and show them my work. Attending events and meeting professionals is something I have been aiming to improve on as I feel it is crucial to not only getting my name out there, but improving my craft by exposing my work to critique. I received some great feedback from people who have been in the game industry for years and I was given some advice about my portfolio presentation, as well as some elements to focus on such as displaying props and individual assets on my Artstation page.

Overall the experince was a great inspiration and I am eager to get back to working on my project so that it can stand alongside some of the other great student projects the unversity has produced this year.

UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE (2018). Animation Exposé 2018. [Online Video]. May 23rd. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a9sCTycaRU&t=20s. [Accessed: 23/05/2018].

Week 1 - Tuesday: Material Setup

When it comes to creating materials for my 3D assets, I usually do it entirely within Substance Painter. In the past this was quite helpful as a lot of my assets were unique and didn’t use the same material. This time however I am imagining a lot of my assets to be made from a similar material such as wood or marble. However because I am using custom normal maps per asset It becomes quite inefficient to repeatedly save out multiple versions of the same wood material with the only difference in some cases being the normal and ambient occlusion maps.

To do so would require me duplicating the same material within Substance Painter and applying it to different assets within the software, then baking the effects of the normal value and ambient occlusion into the textures and then exporting them out of Substance to be used as individual maps within Unreal Engine. I know that was quite a mouthful so please see the diagrams I have drawn below that illustrate this workflow.

Step 1: Each asset will usually have a high poly equivalent.

Step 2: Using substance painter I can bake the details of the high poly normal object onto a texture and combine this with the diffuse texture to create the finished material.

Step 3: Once I am happy with the look of the material in Substance Painter I can export it out as three seperate texture maps for use within Unreal Engine.

Step 4: I can then load the maps into Unreal Engine and create an unreal engine material shader and apply it to the asset in the engine.

Step 5: I will then repeat this process for every asset in the environment until they all have unique materials.

Step 6: Once this process is complete, all the assets will have a unique material assigned to it which can be problematic if I need to change the look of a certain material across several assets.

Step 7:  If I needed to change the diffuse texture of assets A-D, I would need to go back into the substance file for each material and then make the changes individually.

As you can see this is a somewhat time consuming and inefficient workflow. I was about to continue working again in this way when I encountered an error within Substance Painter that prevented me from loading in the custom material I had just created onto a new asset. My only option was to then re-create my custom material from scratch onto the new asset, a process that took up precious time. I was frustrated but nevertheless I had recreated the material and applied it successfully onto the new asset. With that done I was about to apply my recreated material onto a new asset when I was met with the same error!

Throughout my previous projects I hadn’t come across this problem before and it illustrated to me how inefficient and flimsy my material workflow has been up to this point.

I decided I had to approach the problem in a new way that would minimise the amount of time consuming busy work I would need for each asset. This is where Unreal Engine’s material instances come into play.

Using Material Instances:

In Unreal Engine you can create copies of a material that when set up correctly, allow for certain attributes to be altered to add variation to repeated materials. These are known as Material Instances. I spent some time developing a workflow to quickly create multiple materials and after some experimentation I believe I have a good system in place. Below I will describe my process and the benefits I think this is going to bring to my production pipeline.

Breakdown of my material instance.

In this example my material instances all utilise the same wood texture however I have enabled them to be hooked up with additional texture maps that can greatly vary their appearance. This workflow requires that I create custom normal maps and ambient occlusion maps within substance painter per asset, and then hook them up into the material instance. See below how I have used the same wood texture but have been able to add variation through custom normal maps.

This is the generic wood material I created and applied to several assets in my scene. Let's say I want to add additional details to a specific set of objects, all I would have to do is create a material instance and change the normal map.

Here you can see the details have changed whilst the look of the wood remains consistent across all the assets.

I can even change the colour of the diffuse texture at once without individually selecting materials and changing attributes!

So far I have utilised the material instances within Unreal Engine to create a variety of materials that all stem from a master material. This method has a variety of benefits, firstly attributes that control the colour, roughness and normal map intensity for example are no longer locked down to a single texture map generated from Substance Painter. Meaning I can create instances of the same material that can appear vastly different from one another.

For example, I could make the colour of one material a shade of red whilst the other is blue, or change how often a texture is tiled dependant on the individual material instance. Both materials will still use the same maps but I can tweak their attributes to add differentiation to them without needing to open up Substance Painter, change the material and re-export the texture maps (something that took me a considerable amount of time previously). Because the normal map remains static the material instance will not lose the appearance of detail.

Secondly because the materials are instanced, they require less computational power making them more efficient in the scene. The Engine no longer has to worry about calculating individual material shaders for different objects, as the majority of materials are now derived from a master material. This also has the benefit of keeping my project much cleaner as I won’t have hundreds of near identical materials clogging up my scene.

And finally this method forced me to be more considerate with UV mapping. I had to place a greater emphasis on my UV layout as each asset is utilising the same master material. This means the direction the UV islands face will need to correspond accordingly with each other. In the past this wasn’t a big consideration for me as I would just align textures correctly in Substance Painter, however I prefer this approach as it means the UV’s are now consistent across all my assets. You can see the example below as to why this was so important for my workflow.

The UV island faces need to align with eachother so that the wood grain is consistent across all assets.

This new approach to UV layout was also very helpful because I knew that certain assets wouldn’t need to go into substance painter and could therefore have their UV islands be placed outside the radius of the UV mapping grid. I could also use this to prevent obvious texture repetition by moving the islands anywhere I wanted.

So far I am pleased with the new direction I am taking with material creation as I already feel that I am working more efficiently. Now previously I had created some custom materials and instances straight in Unreal Engine but hadn’t considered combining this method with the texture maps I had created in substance painter before. It’s obvious to me now how inefficient my previous workflow was and I feel like I should have realised this sooner during my previous projects. I think I can attribute this to my "newness" of game engine pipelines and using Substance Painter in general. Back then I think I was just pleased to get results at all. It’s interesting how encountering an error with the software caused me to rethink my entire approach, and I’m thankful this happened early on as I could have ended up wasting valuable time working harder, not smarter.

Week 1 - Monday: Project Planning with an Updated Schedule

With the completion of my major study planning folder, I have updated my project schedule Gantt chart. I have tried to keep this chart as streamlined and easy to read as possible. I have broken down my schedule into 13 weeks with each week being further organised into individual days. By breaking the schedule down into sizeable chunks, I can easily keep track of each day and assignment then cross them off as they are completed. By doing this I will also be using this Gantt chart as my project calendar.

I have tried to give myself enough time in each area of production whilst keeping my chart easy to read and concise. I have intentionally tried to streamline this schedule so that there is no confusion. I feel this is the best approach for me, as I don’t feel as overwhelmed about the amount of work when it is visually condensed in this way.

I feel I have set myself a realistic schedule which includes the timetabled tutorials and symposium sessions as well as the weekends in which I will not have access to computer rooms in the Film and Music building. Because of this I have tried to factor in a buffer time for further development and problem solving as I will likely come across unexpected production issues over the course of the module and may not have access to the facilities I require throughout the full production.

As I am working individually, I have built my project around the areas I am strongest in. This means that I have tried to maximise the amount of time for 3D modeling and asset creation.