Common Art Final Submission

 This week I worked on fine tuning the overall look of the environment (water, grass, etc.) and vfx. This is a summary of my final work on this project:

Portfolio Focus: VFX and Materials

What I learnt:

• Raymarching volumetrics & UE5 Volumetric Clouds
• Runtime Virtual Textures
• Working with events in Niagara (Collision and Location events)
• Working with Light Renderers in Niagara
• Optimizing scenes + what contributes to tanking frame rate
• Working on cinematics is different. You can art direct everything. Don’t randomize.

Clouds

Grass and Landscape RVTs

Water

Shooting Stars

Smoke and Steam

Fireflies

Common Art Summer Sprint 5

 This week, I worked on fixing up bugs with the grass color at night, as well as minor tweaks to the shooting stars.

To deal with the grass color at night, I used Material Parameter Collections with a parameter to lerp. This is what the grass looks like at nighttime:

I also improved the fade of the shooting stars.

Common Art Summer Sprint 4

 This week I worked on the shooting stars and a first pass water material. I used the references in the movie more as an inspiration than something to replicate as I was trying my own spin on it:

This was my system for the shooting stars. It has a lot of collision and location events.

I also attached smoke and steam to the mesh and made a water shader.

Common Art Summer Sprint 3

 This week, I worked on finishing up clouds and grass. For the clouds, I finally ended up using Volumetric clouds with a material.

This is the material I used for it:

I also changed the grass material to record lighting and shadow information. I started working on a shooting star vfx:

Common Art Summer Sprint 2

 This sprint I worked on creating the material and RVTs for the grass using Kayleigh's grass cards. I also created some cloud planes as an alternative to the raymarched clouds as I was running into some issues with the edges.

These are my materials for the Landscape and Grass. I used a landscape grass type which dynamically applies the grass to only certain layers.

For the planar clouds, I made an RGB cloud in Houdini and made a material in Unreal. I used flow maps for some basic initial movement, which I will continue to improve on.

As for the weird artefact on the raymarched cloud:

Common Art Summer Sprint 1

 As a part of the Ghibli project I am responsible for all the VFX and materials. Howl's Moving Castle contains a lot of stylized steam, smoke, and clouds. I primarily wanted to work on those three components. These are my references:

For the steam and smoke I will be using UE5 Niagara, and for the clouds I am planning to use raymarching along with volume slices. This is a preview of proxy for the clouds as well as the volume slices I rendered in Houdini using Mantra:

Proxy Steam and Smoke:

My next steps would be to add lighting and shadow information to the cloud and generate better volume textures. Along with this I will be improving the steam and smoke to have them follow curved paths. I will be adding materials to grass cards for creating the stylized foliage.

Common Art Figure Drawing Portfolio

This is my final work from the Common Art figure drawing class. These pieces were sketched out over a few weeks. In some of these pieces I focused on specific parts of the body and how they react to light.

 

Common Art Spring Week 4: Lighting Challenge

 

For this assignment, I picked Lighting Challenge #2: Using Color theory

I picked complementary hues of orange and blue on the color wheel. I modified an existing asset for the bottle and made my own sand mesh. I tried to achieve the overall warm lighting from the environment with a fog and introduced a complementary light on the rim. My goal was to create a lonely and slightly eerie, haunted feeling to indicate that this is an abandoned wasteland or beach, where this bottle does not belong.

Common Art Spring Week 3

 These are my renders for this week's assignment. I made two materials, one for each element of the prop. I used grunge textures to create a roughness map for the peeled metal effect.

       Close up:

Far away:

Material 1 (main body):

Material 2  (Unreal symbol):

Common Art Spring Week 2

 This are my lighting renders for the second week. The scenes were rendered in Unreal Engine 5.0. I used a post processing volume and Skylight with two separate HDRs. The first HDR is from a daytime scene and the second one is from a nighttime scene. It was interesting to see the effect of the HDR on the environment (the infinity wall) and overall tone of the scene. 

HDR 1

Bloom

Depth of Field

HDR2

Common Art Week 1 (Spring)

 This is my lighting render for the first module of Common Art. The first image is my main render. I added some warm temperatures to the main light and cool temperatures to the rim and fill lights.

Color separated renders:

Red (Main):

Blue (Rim):

Green(Fill):

My overall lighting setup included 3 area lights: one for each main, rim and fill light.

Common Art VR Week 6

 

This week I focused on improving the character animation state machine. I also added a level blueprint to play a video on the laptop. We also improved the lighting and introduced more assets into the room.

Animation BP

Character BP

Level Blueprint for Media

Perforce Screenshot