Creating the vortex
I wanted to challenge myself with this vortex, I could possibly make something interesting in substance designer but that would require textures and would most likely be static without any assistance. I decided ultimately that this sphere texture should be made 100% in UE4. The texture of the vortex is fairly simple and would mainly be based around the Fresnel Function. Let's take a look at what I'm creating and break down each part that would be created in UE4. I also have to preface that I'm not super technical but I was able to get results I wanted, there might be more efficient ways but this is what I did.
So straight off the bat one element that stands out to me is the harsh bright edge of this sphere. This edge is much brighter and defined compared to the inside of the sphere. You can also see that there is texture on the edge which I think implies a surface. It does look like a solar eclipse but the information I see makes me think its a 3D shape that emits a light. You can also notice that this looks similar to depictions of black holes, this is because of the dark centre.
To point out the colours, the whole concept has a wash of blue tint due to atmospheric fog. My interpretation is that the colours of the vortex are closer to a red hue because of the warm light the edge gives off.
So the three elements I have dissected from this image is:
1- Sharp Bright Edge
2- Textured Surface
3-Dark Centre.
As I have said before, the majority of the work will be centred around using the Fresnel Function. Here is what the Fresnel looks like. It already almost looks like the concept art.
I wanted to isolate the edge so that I could make it have a sharp contrast of colour. I used a CheapContrast node to do so.
To add the colour I just simply multiplied it on top the CheapContrast.
The base colour of the vortex is a bright red that darkens to a darker shade towards the centre. I used a Lerp node to add two colours together and using the Fresnel in the Alpha. The Alpha controls the distribution of the colours, If I were to swap the inputs of A and B the result would be a dark edge and bright centre.
I wanted the centre of the Vortex to be much darker than it already is. To do so I divided the Fresnel to make the Fresnel darker, I then used a CheapContrast to control the harshness of the transition. To add this darkness to the base colour, I used a BlendDarken node to only darken the centre.
This is what it looks like with everything I've created so far. As you can see the colours look pretty dull.
By multiplying the result so far I can increase the brightness of the colours, and since this will be an emmisive, the colours should be bright.
So far all I have are the Sharp Bright Edge and the Dark Centre. I now need to add texture to the Vortex.
My process in creating the texture is by Panning a cloud like texture, this is to add variation of colour and give a sense of shape. Giving a rotational affect will make it appear more as a 3D object than a Static Image.
The variation only appears in the red belt since the panning cloud is multiplied on top. You can also see that the bright edge is barely affected, this is because the values of the edge are so intense that this variation does nothing to it.
Since multiplying the cloud texture on top of the vortex made everything darker, I decided to multiply it again by a static value so that there is more contrast in the sphere.
Finally I wanted to distort the shape so that it would look more unearthly. One thing that should be noted is that due to the tessellation the affect is more intense close up in the editor than it is in the playable level. Because I wanted to make it constantly changing as well I decided to pan the displacement texture as well.
This is what the texture looks like within the editor.
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There is one final thing I wanted to note that I couldn't really find where to place. But it needs to be said somewhere.
So in my UE4 file I had this problem that whenever I pressed play level, the scene would look a lot brighter than it did in the editor. As if there is auto exposure enabled. This is strange because I had already disabled the auto-exposure in the project settings. What I found after a long time of pulling my hair out is that the camera attached to the 3rd person character had auto exposure enabled. However if I turned off auto exposure I would have the problem of the scene being darker than it is in the editor. To fix this problem I changed the min brightness as the same as max brightness, which essentially disables auto exposure as it will stay at a constant value.
Final Screenshots
I think one problem I seem to have with every project is not having enough time to light the scene properly. And it seems like this project will be no different. I will however take this advice into FMP, because I will actually have time to properly light my project.
Now I want to show a before and after.
In this image I have the bare bones of lighting, I have a directional light and sky light for the light coming from outside of the shed. This does cast an interesting shadow on the floor, however my problem was that the shadows are wayyy too dark. So dark that it wouldn't be fixable with post processing.
I found the way to fix this issue was to bump the skylight to an insane degree, and add a few point lights with inverse square fall off turned off. My reasoning behind this was to fill in the space with more bounce light that I wasn't getting from my directional light. If I only depended on my directional light, then the colours of the scene would be bleached out.
Overall I think there is definitely a lot missing from this scene, the ground texture should be hay and dirt instead of the grass that is there. There should be stacks of hay everywhere. And the cherry on the top would be "Red Weed" or red vines everywhere. Which would help portray the idea of an alien invasion. There are also somethings in the scene already that I would tweak with. But at the end of the day I have to remind myself that I was able to create this in just about 2 weeks. And if I were given more time I could improve this scene by a mile.
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