Lighting Workshop HW3

 

Used Asset Pack Forest Fungi - Mushroom Pack by Guardians Labs.

Concrete Cat Statue from Sketchfab

References

WIPS

Simple Crate Project Part 3

 This was the final week of this project. We finished the textures in substance painter and then exported everything into Unreal to render. 

Use of Compositions Week 6

     This week we were tasked with creating an environment for our VR interactive experience. I chose to do the thirds Composition with the Colosseum. The player will be placed right before the gate that leads into the area. The player also has access to weapon racks and training dummies. 

Beauty Render

References used

Simple Crate Project Part 2

 This week we worked on sculpting and importing meshes into Substance Painter to bake High Poly sculpts on. 

Rendered in Arnold with only a normal map

High Poly bake in Substance Painter

Reference

Simple Crate Project - Part 1

 This week we started the Simple Crate and Barrel Project. I chose to go with the crate for this assignment. 

Going for this Crate design

Unreal Screenshots

The Proxy Cube imported into Unreal to establish the pipelin

ZBrush Hammer Sculpt Project

    This week we were assigned to sculpt a hammer within ZBrush. 

Rendered Stills

 

In Progress Shots

ZBrush Intro - Sculpting a Head

This week we were introduced to ZBrush and assigned to do a sculpt of a head. This is my first time using ZBrush so I am still getting used to the controls. 

Process Screenshots

Minecraft Level Assignment

   

    This week our assignment was to replicate a Minecraft aesthetic while learning about using opacity and translucency. 

Texture File of the grass and flowers

Texture File of grass block

    Masked is for opacity and translucency is for translucency. You can change these blend nodes even on instances of materials. 

    Note that for the grass materials, when you change the material's shading model to "Two sided Foliage", the colors seem to get washed out. You need to plug in the base color to the subsurface color input to get the colors back. Also don't forget to check "Two Sided" on as well.

Node tree for the master block material

    The node tree for the Master block material included a section that used the time node multiplied by a wave height node to offset the (z) world position of the block, making the block move up and down in a smooth motion. It includes a Wave On Off node along with a parameter to choose to turn it off or on. This was supposed to be used for a water block.

All of this goes to the World Position Offset input for the material

    I wanted to try and apply this to the grass and flower planes, but to make it look more like wind. I looked at materials from the Meadow - Environment Pack on the Unreal Marketplace since I had used it in another project, and the materials for the realistic grass looked as if wind was blowing through it. 

These nodes would also go to the World Position Offset input for the material

    This material utilized the Simple Grass Wind node and promoted most of it's inputs to parameters. The 'additional world position object' input comes from the texture object node (base color). From there it is multiplied by a Camera Depth Fade node, so that grass farther away from the camera does not move as much as grass closer to the camera. I didn't like the effect this created, as the planes moved up and down too much and would appear to be floating at some instances. I had tried to include a Split Component Node to only get the X and Y components to mitigate the floating feeling, but it wasn't working. I went looking for another tutorial to follow and found this one that worked for me by WACOMalt. 

    These nodes work by using a normal map (i used a grass normal map in the starter content folder), sliding it across world space coordinates and then interpolating that position with the position of the original vertices normals using a LERP node. This allows for the bottom vertices to stay 'stuck' to the bottom of the ground. The final node is plugged back into the World Position Offset of the material. 

    The normal map that we use, is scaled to a very large degree (that constant 3 node with the 18000x18000x18000 is what's causing to scale), and then we are panning that normal map back and forth over all the grass, and using those coordinates to blend with the original vertex normal coordinates. It's a global texture moving across the plane, and therefore distorts each plane uniquely but smoothly. The Panner node only uses the X and Y world position coordinates because we only want the gras to go side to side, not up and down (it also only takes a vector2 not a vector3).

    Also important to note that the normal map is a texture object not a texture sample, because a texture object exists without any mapping until it is projected, which is what we do with the World Aligned Texture Node.  

    The mask node after the World Aligned Texture node is to mask out the 'b' component (z) and replaced with the constant 0 because we don't want to distort the grass up and down. 

    The next multiply node in the video he only multiplied it to 16 to make a strong wind effect. I had promoted it to a parameter to change it if needed but left the default to 5.

    Tip: you can create a LERP node by holding down L and clicking.

    The LERP node here is blending with the distortion you've created and the original position, blending them based on a gradient based upon UV coordinates (a vertical gradient, 0 at the bottom 1 at the top, because we want the bottom to have no distortion and the top to have full distortion).

    Right click on the LERP node and choose "start preview mode" to see how the distortion is working. 

Week 01 - Use of Basic Shapes Assignment

    I was assigned to Team Hercules and we decided to combine it with a Despicable Me/Illumination Studios art style. Eventually these designs will be used in a VR game. This assignment had us build both the interactable character (Hercules) and the player's hands (Megara) out of basic shapes. 

Hercules (Interactable Character)

    Starting with references, my main inspiration for this character blockout was the character Stronghold from Minions: Rise of Gru and Eduardo Perez from Despicable Me 2. I also looked at classical statue depictions of Hercules, often shown with a beard and wearing the Nemean Lion skins. To pull from real life, I looked at Olympic shot put athletes, specifically Ryan Crouser to see what a strong body physique looks like. 

PureRef board for Hercules

    A lot of Illumination characters have a larger upper body, and then very tiny feet. I wanted to keep this exaggeration with a broad chest, and then contrasted with tiny legs. Since Hercules is known for his superhuman strength, his hands also needed to be large and bulky.

Hercules Print

Megara (Player Hands)

    Most human characters in Illumination's movies have small hands, with a few exceptions. For women they are also more slender and longer. I also looked at traditional depictions of Megara and other women in Greek art. In my research I also learned about the 'Herakles Knot', which is a wedding symbol on a gold armband. 

PureRef board for Megara

    I kept the slender hands for Megara but also added a torus, perhaps to incorporate a bracelet with a Herakles Knot into her character design later on.

Megara Hands Print

Everything uploaded to Perforce