WEEK 11 (MAR 22)
Staying at home...
Ohh, everyone is stressing out. Our university is closed to prevent COVI-19 spreading, the library is closed as well. Some of my classmates went home, some of them working here and everyone is stressed and a bit disappointed about everything. I've seen various pictures and posts and a lot of people are mad about the situation we 3rd years are now.
It is going to be interesting in the end, how this situation will work out. Our final assessment, our presentations and in the end - our graduation. Tough times.
Nothing much
Nothing much changed since last week. But I had this thought about the skylight of my level - should it be day time or night time? The warehouses are evenly lit because people work there. But my final scene will suffer if I'm going to do a super clean well-lit scene with hundreds of meshes. It will be to busy and all my hours of work could be wasted.
If I want to add some secret tor my scene, I should make it dark. Strong shadows and contrast create points of interest and points where some secrets could be hidden.
Let's get back to my old Whats_behind_the_Door project for a second. I showed my final renders to my friend who is a film-making industry and he sent me back this beginner-level render of the environment with really good lighting in it. Even though my work was more advanced and had nice details, it looked a bit flat compare to that render. My level had this yellow tone overlay and had no strong shadows. I need more contrast for this project!
Back to my 372 industries project, so I figured out, that having night scene is more interesting, it plays well with my scene and the lighting will be easier since its just artificial light and no natural sunlight and shadows which can't be controlled.
If I want to add some secret tor my scene, I should make it dark. Strong shadows and contrast create points of interest and points where some secrets could be hidden.
Let's get back to my old Whats_behind_the_Door project for a second. I showed my final renders to my friend who is a film-making industry and he sent me back this beginner-level render of the environment with really good lighting in it. Even though my work was more advanced and had nice details, it looked a bit flat compare to that render. My level had this yellow tone overlay and had no strong shadows. I need more contrast for this project!
Back to my 372 industries project, so I figured out, that having night scene is more interesting, it plays well with my scene and the lighting will be easier since its just artificial light and no natural sunlight and shadows which can't be controlled.
Nighttime
I changed the sun height from default to -1. It automatically got darker and way more interesting. After playing with some parameters I had pretty pleasing night scene. The stars were there, the clouds as-well. A calm summer night.
The right side of the Moon
Have Unreal Engine has the Sun but not the Moon? Snap! I think what's missing in this scene is the big white moon. I am not sure if the player will notice it through the roof windows but I think it will add a nice touch to my project. So let's create one.
First, I need a sphere mesh and a picture of the Moon. Unwrapped Moon, to be precise.
Then, we need to create this material of the Moon. It looks like that: (picture below)
Here we can control UV rotation, saturation, glow and edge saturation.
The shining
We have the Moon. You know those weirdly satisfying nights when it seems like the Moon is actually emitting light? When you can see your own shadow following you. Those nights are magical. Can we try to do something similar here?
Yup, but since we can't make it actually glowing (because it will hide the texture of the moon) we could try to fake it.
We could create a glowing plane behind our Moon and use translucent parameter. The material for that looks like this:
And now, if we apply these materials to two meshes in our MOON_Blueprint we have this outcome: (right)
Let's place it in our scene. It looks good but we have one issue. This mesh should be seen from anywhere in the world and it should face us directly every time we look at it. My Project is not that big, but just imagine if you walk further away and you can see that our Moon mesh is facing some weird direction with a plane behind it.
We need to create a script so our Moon will be facing the player all the time. It looks like this:
Since its cosmic thingy and it is way bigger than us we need to send it up where it belongs. We talking big numbers here.
Let's send it 830000 units away from us XYZ. Scale it about 60-80 times and we have this beautiful big lamp hanging in our scene.
We need to tweak the parameters in Moon_mat and adjust the UV rotation parameter so it will face us on the right side (since we always see the same side of the Moon). Adjust the glowing in the glowing_mat parameters and it is done!
The Moon is up, it's facing us all the time. Now, I am going to rotate the default SkySphereBlueprint so the light will be emitting directly from that part where our Moon is. The outcome looks quite good:
What's next?
See you soon!
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