Lighting can be very difficult to get right...

Hello everyone!

I was meant to write this post on the weekend but it's been incredibly busy! On Saturday I was all day in the GTUK taekwondo British championships and on Sunday I had training followed by committee meeting. By the time I got home (both days) I was knackered and all I wanted to go was to go to sleep.

Anyway, we finally finished our film room project last Thursday! It has been an enjoyable project to work on although it restricted us a lot in terms of creativity. We were just copying a scene that somebody had already created.

It was challenging too. It was hard to make our scene to look exactly like the original mainly due to the lighting.

Texturing was once again challenging, but easier than it was for the asset swap project.

The way I look at PBR texturing is how materials work in real life. The albedo is the colour of the material just like a fridge is white and grass is green. If those materials got contaminated by anything that caused their original colour to change, that would affect the albedo.

Roughness helps the material understand how it must behave depending on the lighting.

We also had to create light maps for the first time which I enjoyed as it made the models look a lot better in terms of lighting. 

I didn’t stumble upon any major problems when I tested my toy cars in engine.  All I had to do was to tweak the textures so that they looked closer and closer to the real look of a toy car. I kept going back and forth between Photoshop and UE4.

I decided to not use Marmoset2 since the objects look in a different way as they do in engine and to me it is a waste of time when I can just put them into engine and work from there.

This is our final scene which I am proud of. It's amazing to see how much we have accomplished by working together. 

After we finished our scene in Unreal we had to produce a paper model and light it.
I enjoyed doing the paper model and since I finished my 3D assets before everyone else I focused on the paper model and to make it look good.

We used the block mesh we created in 3D studio max for scale and proportion. We started with basic geometry, squares and planes and afterwards I added wrinkled bits of paper to create the organic shapes of the tent.

Lighting was hard to get right on the paper model considering the materials we used didn't have the transparency of a tent and the the lighting sources we used (phones).

In conclusion,  I believe this project was very successful even though lighting the scene was difficult. We didn't manage to get the back of the tent to look the way it does in the movie, the tent's lighting is not even all the way through, and that’s partially due to the underestimation of the difficulty of the project.

It was a good experience and I have learned quite a lot in terms of organization, efficient planning and working in a group in general. I am looking forward to the next group project.

See you soon! 

Carla.