13: Unreal Engine

 Unreal Engine

In Unreal I slowly imported every asset I modelled and textured. This was very easy to set up, once I imported the 3d models and the textures, all I had to do was assign each texture to the shader, just like in Maya.

As I have many 3d assets, I created specific folders for each one, this would make it easier to work with and reimport in case I needed to.

As I kept working on this environment I also kept asking for feedback, this helped me to improve the look, learn new skills and other technical skills in Unreal.

Key aspects were:

To understand the why, how, what and when.

As this is a post apocalyptic environment. I would need to think of where the electricity is coming from, how it works, what year is it based on, how do the people that live in it move around and what they eat.

I also looked at other artists' environments on Artstation, to see how they showcase them and what they have done with theirs that I could add to mine. 

This is when I worked on and added the generator, the batteries and motorbike. I also learned how to add ''God rays'' to the scene, to give it a moodier feeling. 

Other technical skills that artists use are vertex painting and splines.

Vertex painting allows you to paint on geometry using multiple textures that you create. 

The plaster material I made, I went back to Designer and exported 2 different textures, one with paint and other with just plaster. 

In Unreal, using vertex painting I was able to give the ceiling a slight different look.

One set back is that vertex painting works better the higher the subdivision and although it is great to use it can cause performance issues. However, Unreal Engine 5 will change this.

Using splines allowed me to place assets along a curve which I can control. I can randomize the position and the assets as I extend the spline. The set back is that it is very technical and node based

This is the graph for the splines. I also added some jars I made, and created their own spline.

There are multiple videos on Youtube on how to made splines and although they are similar to this, they were not what I was looking for. I tried to reach out to artists who I saw used splines and see if I could get some help but there was no luck. 

Thanks to a tutorial by Juliang Zhang's tutorial on Artstation I was able to. 

Once I finished setting up the scene, I created and animated multiple cameras from different angles.  

Final renders