22/01/24
Uploading my work into Unreal took a few tries to get right. The first time I uploaded my scene, everything seemed fine. I organised everything in the right place and had a look around the scene, but when I opened it back up a while later, I was left with a blank project with the default landscape only. This continued to happen for the next few trials until I had to ask someone for help.
Part of the issue was that I would upload my scene into Unreal in class, where Unreal was at 5.0.3 but the Unreal I installed at home would be 5.3. It made sense when I finally realised this, but I had another issue after I managed to import my scene and add my texture. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but when I opened the file, nothing showed up.
I tried reopening the original file and redownloading the zip file multiple times, but nothing changed, so I had to restart the whole thing. It wasn’t really that big of an issue, but it was definitely frustrating as it was quite a long process to add the textures to each object.
After opening a new project, the first thing I did was to make sure I saved it properly, only adding a few things on and saving it before I closed and reopened it to make sure everything was still in place. Once all was good, I was more comfortable putting everything into Unreal.
Another issue I had was that the colours of my textures were all significantly lighter than they should’ve been. I checked the texture map to see if it was the pictures that were the issue, but they were all correct until dragged into the scene. I hoped that after putting the roughness and normal maps in, it would become normal again, but even after bringing them in, the colours were still off. This was a big problem as all the details in the textures had disappeared with the base colours, so I was worried that my scene would end up having no details and just plain colour.
I tried asking around if others knew what the issue was but no one did so I had to look online for an answer. Of course, not even knowing what the issue was, it was a bit difficult to explain what the problem was to find a solution but after a while, I finally found a video explaining what was wrong.
It turns out I had exported all my textures in 16-bit instead of 8 and Unreal doesn’t support 16-bit, which is why the colours was wrong. I ended up removing all the base colours and re-exporting the new 8-bit textures out of Substance Painter and into Unreal.
I had a few difficulties uploading my scene, as I exported my objects in several different files since my UVs were a bit of an issue. I spent a while trying to size and angle every new object correctly into the scene.
I changed the sky light to a soft pink and turned the intensity down I liked the softness of the pink and with the lower intensity, the point lights I was going to add onto my flowers and lanterns would stand out more.
Using point light for both the flowers and lanterns, I set them in place first at the centre of the object. For the lanterns, I went for a light pastel orange and for the flower, a light pink similar to the skylight. For all different lights, they had to be very low; otherwise the scene would be too bright.
This was what the scene looked like so far. Once all the textures were added, I got started with making the water. I started off following this tutorial, where I had to physically make the water material. It started off pretty well, I managed to make a reflective surface and make the colour I wanted but it was a bit too reflective and it looked more like a mirror than water so I looked for another video I could follow.
I ended following this video instead. Rather making my own water material, I used the water plugin in unreal to add a lake. Although it did feel a bit like I was cheating, as I originally wanted to make my own material, I’m happy with this option since I felt like it would’ve looked a lot better than if I had made my own.
Next was adding the landscape. My initial idea was to make the scene more flat and open, like an island in open water. After looking through some camera angles, I felt that the scene ended up very empty and a bit out of place, so using the landscape I already added in with the water, I decided to build it up a bit into an enclosed area. It was a very quick process, as I wasn’t going to focus on it in detail; it just needed to make it look like some mountains in the background.
The problem was that my rock for the waterfall looked very out of place as the texture of the mountains was completely different from the one on the rock, so I had a look in quixel bridge and selected a few premade textures on it that looked the most similar to the rock. I grabbed 5 different rock cliff textures that I thought would blend in and tried them one by one. I ended up choosing Rock Cliff Wgoradh. Even though it didn’t blend in 100%, I felt that with a few changes in lighting, it would look a lot more similar.
For the sky, I removed the original and added a PBR sky sphere, changing the sun height to -0.375 as I wanted the scene to be during sunset, I chose sunset for my sky as I felt that the soft, warm colours suited the story for the scene, and as it is their beloved garden and final resting spot, I wanted the ambience to be warm.
For the waterfall, I used assets from the water plugin. I chose to use the waterfall arc mesh and shaped it so it would fit the middle crevice on the big rock. It was a bit difficult to set it up at first, When set up flat and straight up, it would look good from the front but from a low camera angle, you could clearly see the rocks coming up underneath the waterfall as it was moving. I ended up having to tilt the waterfall slightly down to make sure the rock wouldn’t be showing from undeath when looking at a lower angle.
I wanted to add some flora to the grass, as I felt it was a bit flat and lacking in grass or flowers. Again, I went to Quixel Bridge to look for some weed and flower assets. I ended up choosing a few different types and added them into the scene by placing them down one by one. I didn’t want too many, just enough to add a bit more depth to the island.
I ended up not adding as much as I wanted as Unreal kept crashing when I tried to add any more flowers and move it around, so I stuck with what I had.
Finally, I started setting up my cameras. Starting from the initial camera I originally set up in blender, I added a camera to the scene and slowly adjusted it using the camera preview option
I ended up setting up 6 different cameras. I chose these angles so I could show off everything that was in the scene, as there were a few different things going on. I really liked the shot with the go-board in; it was an important part of the scene and I was struggling to figure out a way to showcase it. The gravestones ended up being a bit difficult to show without having a camera shot of its own, it wasn’t my favourite but I wanted it to have a showcase so I had to add it in.
Because my scene had moving water in it, I wanted to render a video showing the animation of the water, I really struggled to do this, as I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. I ended up having to look it up, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected.
First, I had to add the movie render queue plugin in order to actually be able to make the video. Following the video, I downloaded ffmpeg, extracted it and copied the bin file path into the CLI encoder. When pasting the path in, I had to make sure I added ffmpeg.exe at the back as well. I had to fill out the video and audio codec as well as the output file extension myself. which were llibx264, aac and mp4. It was very important that the information I put in was correct so I made sure to double-check before closing it.
Back in content browser, I added a sequence folder in the content folder and added multiple sequences. I had to add a new cine camera and I angled them to the different camera angles I set up earlier. It was a bit difficult trying to angle them right as my computer was starting to become very slow. I ended up taking a lot of time setting up the cameras and got very frustrated halfway through.
I went into the movie sequence render channel and following the video, I added the Command Line Encoder export and made sure to tick the delete source file box since I didn’t want a bunch of rendered .jpgs. I also added the anti-aliasing settings in, I didn’t actually know what this did but being better safe than sorry, I followed the tutorial and added it in.
At first, I couldn’t render the videos; it was just images and I couldn’t figure out why. After experimenting a few times, I remembered I had to render the videos in the same place where I put the ffmpeg file so I switched my export destination there. After that, I had no issues with rendering the videos