This blog will track the progress for the work that will be completed for my collaboration class with Harbor Picture Company. Our project will be mainly produced in Unreal Engine 5.
Week 10
Here's the final result that my team put together! Thanks to all of the mentors at Harbor Picture Company and faculty at SCAD my team was able to push our idea to be the best that we could! If given 2 more weeks, I would take time to improve the clean up on the bottle's rendering artifacts, and I would also add an extra element to the sky in shot 4, like how we originally intended in our concept art.
Here is a breakdown video showing my compositing process in Nuke:
Week 9
This week I figured out how to render a Z-Depth pass in UE5. Because our scene is so large, I had to manually make adjustments to the multiply node in the world depth shader so that the falloff for the depth is much farther than it is by default.
Using Nuke, I am able to view the depth of the scene with this shader as an .EXR layer.
We have finalized our foreground environment and I have a final stencil pass for the bottle. As you can see, the stencil rotoscopes the monolith from the environment. and even leaves the space where the rocks overlap the bottle as a transparent alpha.
Week 8
This week I've done experimentation using UE5's exponential height fog. Path tracing support was just added for this feature, but since it is brand-new some of the parameter controls don't function correctly. To circumvent this issue, we have decided to take the approach of rendering out the environment separately from the monolith. The environment with exponential height fog will be rendered in Lumen, and the bottle will be rendered with Path-tracing shaders.
Here is a comparison of our environment in Path Tracer compared to Lumen. As you can see, the exponential height fog is much more visible and effective when rendered in Lumen.
Using UE5's stencil layers feature, we are able to get a render layer of the bottle with transparency.
Our final renders for the environment and the bottle will be composited together in Nuke.
Week 7
After receiving feedback from the mentors at Harbor, we have made further adjustments and improvements to our 3D environment.
Also per the mentor's feedback, we have decided to cut out Shot 3, the shot that focuses on the star on the back of the bottle. The geometry of the star may be too complex for Unreal Engine 5 to render properly.
Week 6
My team has opted to do a full rehaul of the 3D environment rather than using 2.5D assets- this should help convey a more authentic sense of depth in the scene.
Week 5
Below is an animatic with our most recent iteration of shaders, environment and lighting:
We are continuing development on our shaders, lighting and environment. We have selected our hero shots and are beginning to finalize our look. Professor Gaynor suggested that we implement distant mountains and volumetric fog to give our scene a sense of depth.
My task this week is develop 2.5D assets for mountains to implement in our scene. Using free to use images from Pexels and Pixabay, I have gathered some reference images to use.
Week 4
This week, my team focused on building the environment, lighting, and shaders for the project. Using path-tracing techniques in UE5, we are able to get a nice glass shader for our model. Also, I have made adjustments and tweaks to the camera moves based on feedback from the mentors at Harbor VFX.
There are definite lighting improvements that need to be made in order for our project to be more visible. Also, we encountered an issue in which many of the assets in the UE5 viewport look different or do not appear visible in the final render. My team is doing research to see if we can make use of Perforce systems or multi-user editing to share our project files seamlessly, because currently our workflow is quite rocky. I'm excited to see what the mentors have to say about our project this week. With continued focus from my team, I am confident that we will be able to deliver a polished product by the end of the quarter.
Week 3
Taking feedback from the mentors at Harbor and my professors, I've made further improvement to the Previsualization of our product video. My team went out and filmed some live footage to use as lighting and shading reference for future iterations.
This week I am focusing on polishing the model and developing the visualization of our video. I was able to fix the issues that I was having with the topology of the nozzle. Below is the most updated version of the model and shaders:
Some camera angle tests of the model in UE5:
Week 2
Production begins! I have been tasked with modeling the bottle of cologne. Here is a work-in-progress photo of the model in Maya. I've imported the model into UE5 as an .fbx to begin material tests. Right now I'm having issues figuring out how to get tinted shadows on the glass and plastic materials of the bottle. Below is my first version of a lookdev test in UE5.
Week 1
My team members and I have decided to create a short product showcase of the cologne "Alien Man" by Mugler. We chose this product because we liked the sleek and simplistic design. We also chose this product because it comes in a handful of varieties that we can include in our final video.
When I first saw the design of the bottle, my mind immediately jumped draw a comparison to the obelisk from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both share a similar silhouette, and both have an extra-terrestrial connection (at least through namesake on the cologne's behalf). In preparation for the project, I created 3 style boards that conceptualize the atmosphere and environment of our product showcase:
The bottle of cologne is located on a cosmic world. Located behind and above the bottle, a dramatic solar eclipse is occurring in center-top frame. As the camera pans and showcases the design of the bottle, particles begin to emit from the ground, casting a glow on the surface of the cologne.
At the end of the video, we are shown the name of the product, with the backdrop a stargate reminiscent of the famous sequence from 2001.
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