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DIVE Teaser Trailer Final University Submission

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DIVE: Throne Room (Character)

Accordint to the Animatic: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kkM0cnA=/ the Kybrex in the Throne room is sitting with multiple cables around it. 

I took the model and the throne to UE4 and assigned the textures, then I set the camera to a cool angle and realized there could be more cables. Therefore I made a Blueprint for splines and then moved and twisted these around the character and the throne, making them look like cables coming from the back of the Kybrex. 

After I set the lights better, again with a nice yellow that would bring the gold gold material stand out and started planning the shots for this scene.  For all shots and scenes I have used cinecameras, in order to play with the aperture, focal lenses and other settings.  One cool shot I got for this scene can be seen in this link: https://youtu.be/qV78bVjb3fM Something I found quite hard was how to make the eyes of the kybrex be seen withouth glowing too much or too little. But I gess zooming in his face quite solved the issue.  Something I really liked was how the light cast on all the materials in the Kybrex, making not only the room but also the character convey opulence. 

Since the deadline was pushed to the 17th, the trailer should come a bit later since there is more time to polish scenes. I shall post any updates on scenes that are polished and in the end the teaser trailer! So stay tunned! 

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DIVE: Throne Room

Again the throne room was a different map from the previous 3 scenes.  I composed it with assets from sci fi packs, the aztec temple pack and assets modeled by our team. It was a very quick environment to compose and create.  When it comes to lighting, the main light was obviously blue, then I thought that since there are gold elements in the throne, I would reinforce this and add a yellow light to bring attention and focus to this part of the environment.  The biggest challenge was when I added the post processing and started playing with reflection and then the SSR created noise in the metal surfaces.  After doing research on the matter, https://evermotion.org/tutorials/show/10688/high-quality-reflections-in-unreal-engine-4, I have used planar reflections to hide the grain and bring back the good reflections while keeping the SSR, which gives more atmosphere to the scene.  SSR is usually used instead of ray traycing, since the latest is very heavy in and lowers the performance of a computer.   Screen Space Reflections (SSR), when enabled and set quality to 100, creates noise and decreases the quality of the reflections, making them blur and grainy. This is why the Planar Reflections were a good shout when I researched it. Because the main area where we can notice the SSR grain is in the metalic walls on both sides of the Throne, I have applied the Planar Reflections to both of these. Basically it is a plane that was set on top of the asset but it looks like there was nothing put on top of it which is awesome.  Asside from this reflection issue, there was nothing else that brought any concerns. And even this reflection matter was really great because i got to learn a huge deal out of it!

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DIVE: Destroyed Street

The map for this city was pretty straight forward. To start with I composed it with the destroyed buildings we made. Then I added some other assets made by our team such as the lamp, statues, the banners, the emissive flooring.  Following this I experimented with the height fog and later adjusted this one as I put the fire to simulate the fog spreading throughout the street. Afterwards I added cables and debree, decals and other assets that would mak the street look destroyed and abandoned.  Finally, I added the lamps and lights to the scene alternating between a red light in an alleyway and the white lights spread in the street.  Since its after war and an abandoned street I created a blueprint that makes lights flicker. You can see it in this video: https://youtu.be/jWM3_vmRxZs .

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DIVE: Destroyed City

In the animatic (see in the Miro Board):  https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kkM0cnA=/  there is a shot where the city has been destroyed due to invasion and war.

I got the same map of the previous city, duplicated it and startd deteorating the environment, changing the colour gradient to a darker varient and taking away the lights. The buildings, like one of the previous posts shows, had their textures changes to the destroyed variants.  I used decals fromt he bridge to add cracks, dirt and so on to the environment. As well as this other free packs from unreal were used to add pipes, rocks and the fire like we can see in the first image.  The geometry in the scene was moved, scaled, changed and twisted to convey the destruction of the environment. It was a fun process getting the city and sort of smashing it and breaking it. It came out quite an interesting environment and definitely it conveys darkness and destruction which is what I wanted. 

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DIVE: Cel Shading, Modular Aztec Temple and Technical parameters

The Cel shader was made from scratch. I first made the 3 toon shader, which devides the colour into 3 different shades giving it a very cartoony look and then made the nodes for the black outline. Later I took the outline out and used the free one in the Unreal marketplace and combined it with the 3 toon shader I did. Even though the result was interesting, it was very difficult to work with and get the wanted results so we decided not to use it for now.  The depth field fog however, was kept, to give a depth that the exponential height fog alone could not bring. Both the blue and green fog combined brought better depth to the scene.  Later when the project was on its final stages I tried the Cel shader just out of curiosity and the recult was actually very astonishing!  With the help of university, we got a very cheap pack from the unreal market place of an Aztec Temple. I used some of its assets to build the throne room (see in next post). Because I wanted to add an emissive channel to one of the assets, I downloaded the albedo map, then took it to photoshop and painted the emissive map. Following this, I brought the map to UE4, assigned it to the material and tadaaa! Asset with an awesome emissive was now there! It was the second time using this process, after the japanese environment project and it is a very quick and effective process. From the Aztec modular temple, I used a few assets to help me shaping the environment around th throne room. These were very useful but obviously the focus of the scene was modeled by the team. Other free packs from the market place were used here and there to get some assets to shape the environment!

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DIVE: Buildings

For both the background of the city and the Destroyed City Environent, Antonio Modeled these buildings.  I then took them to ZBrush to give the stylized mtal weariness to them.  After this, since we had both a built in its prime and a destroyed environment, I had to come up with textures for both in each building. This process took a while since texturing can be laborious. 

I used substance source to look over a few materials I could get and a couple caught my eye so I used them for these buildings. Some turned out much bettet than others but overall all buildings turned very interesting.  Besides being laborious there were no issues texturing these buildings. All of them had only 1 UV tile, so I had to use the polygon fill tool to select the exact shells to texture. 

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DIVE: City Environment

Each of the 4 Environments made in UE4 (2 of which are the same but one is destroyed and the other is not) were made in different maps.  The city took the longest. It is not yet to the amazing extent we would like but it looks great and alive. Full of neons and colours. I went from testing the Cel shading to the looks of not having it. We ended up deciding not to use it for the cinematic but rather the game we will develop in the future stages. 

The lighting was and still is very complicated in this environment. We went from having it too dark, cold blue to adding yellows coming from bellow to convey the livelyhood in the city and then taking most of these yellows off as it would take away the focus of the pyramids in the foreground too much. The foreground was composited more carefully than the background. A series of buildings were modeled and textured for the background.  Now that the project has been extended to the 17th of May, we might go back and polish this city scene for the final trailer.  Even though the use of cel shader in the post process was taken away, the depht of field fogs created (blue and green) were still used in combination with the exponential height fog to give more depth and add a mysterious atmosphere to the scene.

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DIVE: Character Modeling and Texturing

The Kybrex, a race of robots with only 1% of organic matter inhabits this world.  This Kybrex Headmaster shows up in 2 shots (one standing in front of the pyramid and other sitting in a throne) See the Animatic in our Miro Board: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kkM0cnA=/

The model was done using both Maya and ZBrush. Even the cloth was better made in ZBrush than Marvelous Designer. After this, the model was then subjected to Decimation Master, in order to decrease the polycount and be supported in Maya. Here I proceeded to do the UV’s, which did not take long.  I thought that because its a character seen quite up close, I would try the use of UDIMs to be able to increase the Texel Density of the Model. Unfortunately, later I was told UE4 did not support UDIMs, and I had to go around quite a complext process, so instead I just assigned different materials to the parts of the Kybrex (like the different colours suggest) and each material would represent a UV tile section (like we learned at university).

I took the model to UE4 where I’ve adjusted the ACES LUT for UE4 as well as using the unreal engine 4 template in the beginning.  I did some research through Substance Source to get cloth materials for the clothes of the Kybrex and metalic materials for the rest. The colours were applied respecting the concept (on the left).  For the Throne, knowing this programe called mixamo that automatically rigs and animates characters, I’ve taken the Kybrex here. It took a while to compute all the joints, however it was not impossible to get the rig on the character and geting it to work. It was a very fun process because there is a vast library of animations and poses we can add to the character and for a while I was playing with a few dancing ones.  There were a few sitting animations which were perfect for what we wanted. Even though these poses deformed the mesh of the character slightly, it was mainly on the back and nobody was going to see this... so it was fine. 

The character with its rig and animation was taken to Maya where I imported the Throne done by Antonio in order to scale both and get the character’s exact pose. I got the hands holding the side of the throne and the character looking magestic. UVs and Textures were exaclty the same. I changed a few elements like the armor pieces, that in Mixamo got deformed, for the original ones in the first character and adjusted the clothes. Then assigned the attributes to get the same UVs and so the textures came out perfect.  In the last image you can see the character in the engine, in the first shot. 

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DIVE: Scale Comparison, Production Assistance Assets & ACES in UE4

As Waste Creative suggested, to create a giants world, where the character would feel small, almost like the world of HALO, when we go to the promethians planet. Therefore, I started preparing a scaling system, which everyone could use when modeling their assets. I used a base model to compare the scale of the pyramids first and then gave the file to the members of the team to use before exporting or texturing their assets. In the weeks of production assistance, we asked the 2nd years to make a few assets, like some statues, pilars and texture these. They were fantastic and accomplished these tasks on time and very well. One of the concepts for a statue modeled by the 2nd years is shown above. It was a comcept i’ve made based on a aztec sord of dog statue, but created mixing sci-fi into it. The model, made after it by a 2nd year turned out amazing (you can see this bellow). Because at a certain point we decided not to use th cel shader anymore, I had to retexture this statue and a Lamp textured by another 2nd year.  There were some flags we had to make for the environment and I’ve made these using Marvelous Designer and textured in Substance Painter.  By this time, when supporting the 2nd Year Class given by Alistair, he was talking about how the colour system in Substance Painter does not match the colour system in UE4. Apparently UE4 uses the ACES system, designed by PIXAR. He then gave students a few tutorials explaining how o implement this colous system in Substance Painter through Look Up Tables (LUT) and straight away I’ve noticed the colours getting more vibrant in Substance Painter.  Later, when assigning the texture maps in UE4, I decided to test both to see if there was that much of a difference and, as per seen in the last image, the difference turned out to be very noticeable. From here forth, I’ve messages all the people in the team explaining this method and how to change it, so we could all achieve a better and coherent look in the Engine. 

As well as this, I have done a quick research on the normal maps of UE4, becaus the normals looked strange in the engine...and found out that we should have been using a UE4 template all along when texturing our models. One reason why is because the SP default template uses the OpenGL normal map format, whereas UE4 used the DirectX format. At first it doesnt look like it makes much of a difference. However, after doing a research and watching tutorials, I’ve seen that bringing normal maps in OpenGL format to UE4 would invert the green map, changing the depth of the normal map. Of course this could be changed inside the engine, which I did with the assets we already had.  Now, whenever I want to make a model to go to UE4, I use the correct template though.

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DIVE Pyramids: Modeling and Texturing

After the meeting with Waste Creating and receiving their feedback, I proceeded to recreate the pyramids. This time with a more stylized approach.  Eventually, with the problems imposed by the Cel Shader, the flatness in the objects, we decided to leave this approach perhaps for later when we develop the actual game. 

After modeling the pyramids before, I took them to Zbrush to give them stylized features. Getting the metal effect was quite difficult at first, but after a few attempts it was not impossible to achieve. 

Texturing the pyramids was not difficult. With te Cel Shader, we agreed not to use roughness or metalic values. However this made the visuals look very flat and so I went back to texture the pyramids (last image) in which these values were put back, bringing better looks to them.

Since we are mixing Maya culture with Sci-fi, I’ve decided to create a few alphas that would mix both and that could be used for texturing the various upcoming assets. 

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D.I.V.E Environment Composition progress

At this point creating the environment, I have experimented with a few more colours for the lights. I have added an HDRI to the post processing that allowed more light to come in the scene. Then I changed the tint from default to purple (which is part of the colour palette). I have also added a slight green to mix with the blue and create more depth and as well as that changed the bright cian blue fog to a darker blue (since the environment is underground and there is no light coming from the surface). All these slight changes in colour and light made the environment reflect the feelings better. Then I started adding some modular assets from the marketplace in order to shaping the aread around and the city we want to create, even though this is at the moment temporary assets.  More boxes and other shapes were added to fill the background as well, which helped selling the depth and crowded city feeling. Again the pyramid textures are to be changed but overall this is the look we have so far for our game’s cinematic. 

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D.I.V.E Environment Testing

I have created some modular pyramids to add to the environment in Unreal and start the composition as well as test the lighting and cel shade.  To create the post process cel shade I have watched a few videos (all in the miro board) in order to create my own shader, both the 3 toon shade and the thick black outline. After creating these in the blueprints I came to a result like it shows on image 5. Then the first happy accident ran accross... when I imported the exponential height fog to the project and the cel shade completely cut the fog depending on the distance set in the blueprints. So either I could have the height fog cut within a radius of distance which looked visually terrible or not have the height fog at all which was not an option since the place is supposed to be very misterious, dark and cold and the cel shade helps selling these feelings as well as the sense of depth. After researching on solutions I have decided to create my own fog in unreal, so I went back to the blueprints. Not only I have learned a lot, I found out I could add more than one fog and so I have combined blue and greeen for the background and a very dark blue fog attached to the camera or player. These would not only help sell the depth and feelings I wanted to achieve but also gave me the opportunity to apply the cold colours chosen for the game (from coolors), which I colour picked from our set palette.  The result on image 6 is how the same shader applies but now with the fogs created. Although the result looked better because now the fog was not affected by the cel shade, now the colours in the buildings looked desaturated and the lights were very dim. To tackle this, after a long research and trying different blueprints, playing around with the values, I decided to try the cel shade from unreal and see what happened.  Image 7 happened... looked much better than before... and I was frustrated to see all my hard work go down the toilet. The cel shade in Unreal had much more options to change the values in the instances. This helped me with the look, the thickness of the outline, but mainly with how flat I wanted the environment to look.. which changed a big deal and helped the colours and lights pop out much more! But something was missing... the hard colours and lines where the light casts in the models... this is when I though to maybe combine both this cel shade and the 3 tone shading, what divides how the light casts in 3, from darker to lightwer values and although it made the lights brighter, it brought the feeling of the shader and how the light casts with its hard lines, which was part of what we aimed to accomplish.  Then I textured one of the pyramids to test how the textures work in the environment but forgot that neither roughness or metalic have a great impact in a cel shaded world (image 3) and so, after disconecting these texture maps from the nodes, the result looked much better (image 4). Nevertheless, we were advised to work more on the textures to come out with a better result, perhaps something way more flat coloured (this is my next step in this project) and support with the cel shade instead of taking it away. 

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D.I.V.E: Concepts and Colour Scheme

Here are some of the concepts we came up with as well as the colour palette for the characters (Humans and Kybrex). Humans or Organics have a warm palette of colours whereas the Kybrex, being robotic and only 1% organic, are mainly coloured in cold colours, but with a hint of warm colours. The environment concepts were tests to create visual ideas for the game. We were inspired by various games like Halo and Destiny to create the visuals for our game with massive, imposing buildings, sculped out of simple shapes like triangules. The reason for using the triangular shapes is mainly because the environment where the humans DIVE into is an unknown dangerous dark place and the shape that best represents danger is the triangle. On the other side of the spectrum, the pyramids are all based in triangular shapes, which supports the visuals of the environment.  One of the pictures shows how the game would look like in the game interface, or the ideal we are aiming for when we push the idea beyond the cinematic trailer. 

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Y3 LIVE PROJECT: D.I.V.E

These past 4 weeks, I have been working in D.I.V.E, a sci-fi tactical game. Antonio has developed the idea and lore for the game. We have started developing concepts and had the idea of creating a world that mixes both sci-fi elements and ancient cultures like Maya, Egyptian and possibly Ancient Chinese.

After we came up with great concepts, Antonio made the storyboard, Animatic and concepts for the characters while I started testing the visuals in the game engine (Unreal Engine 4). Although the inicial idea is to make a trailer for the game, we will still develop the cinematic in Unreal Engine. I have come with the idea of making this world cel shaded, with a limited pallete of colours, where humand would be represented by warm colours and both robots and the world underground would be represented in cold colours.

In a first stage, to test one of out strongest environments (Maya) I have created some easy modular assets to test the composition and lights in Unreal as well as the cel shade, which took me a while to get a good solid result, especially because the exponential height fog was cut by the cel shade so I had to come up with a way around it by creating my own fog. All these changes were great for not only enhancing the project's visuals but also help me develop my knowledge in Unreal Engine.

When the environment was more or less settled, I decided to texture one of the asset pyramids. The thing is that I did not remember that with cel shade, the metal and roughness are not displayed properly because the light is different and so I was advised to retexture this model and create a more stylized piece (which are now the next steps to take!). Overall the game has come to look very solid and promising. Me and Antonio will keep working hard to come with a great cinematic in the end!

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-YEAR 3- Specialist Pathway 2.0: Environment Art (UE4)

This is the Final Outcome for my Unreal Engine 4 Japanese Environment. I’ve definitely learned a big deal with this project. Not only I learned more skills on efficient modelling and texturing, but also got to know how to use Unreal better.  I also managed to retexture assets from the bridge in Quixel Mixer which was quite fun. Playing with nodes in order to paint the terrain with materials from the bridge and achieving splined to create the sand garden patters. The river tool to create the water was extremely challenging and so was the creatiion of the neon cherry blossom petals. Not to mention the amount of times Unreal crashed in the middle of the entire process *cries* It was a very laborious project, however the richness in knowledge I’ve gained made me develop so in my next project I will definitely step up and do even better.  When I finished all the composition and lights in Unreal, I was wondering if what I wanted to show the audience was only a few screenshots... that btw you can check out on my miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kjy9SMo=/ or my Artstation: https://iris-santos.artstation.com/

So I took the initiative to learn Premiere Pro and create a music video and convey the feelings of the environment as well and showcase all the little animation elements, bringing life and a different feeling to this world. 

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*Specialist Pathway 2: Environment Art (Unreal)*

Check this Miro Board where you can find the progress of the Environment I’m currently creating in Unreal Engine 4.  The premise of this project is to create a fusion between Modern Neon Japan and Ancient Japan.