Winter: Senior Studio 1

Class 18 3/5/2025

In this installment of Blog Update Bi-Weekly, brought to you by D3VFX, we have the first round of both rendered EXRs and in 4k no less. Utilizing the screen space cvar I am actually rendering in 7680 x 4320 pixels and then is resampled back to the native out put resolution I have set of 3840 x 2160 pixels. This helps to avoid artifacts and improve anti aliasing resulting in a generally sharper and higher quality image. Resolution changes aside, here are the changes made since last class:

• Lighting has been updated to be cooler tone

• Water FX added to river as well as some stones (WIP). Water plane does not currently display accurately in render compared to realtime, trouble shooting in progress

• Ground plane with tessalation/nanite enabled so that displacement can be applied has been added to second to last shot, material work is in progress and textures are likely to be changed as well.

• Well has been tweaked to be not as bright and include two ravens in the tree for the wider shot. Ground plane from above line item will be added to this shot as well once completed

• Layered control rigs have been enabled on the first shot of the ravens flying but I am currently missing a step somewhere, trouble shooting in progress but those ravens feet will be moved eventually!

Despite the nearly quadruple increase in resolution size (before resample) and the jump from and 8bit PNG to a 16bit EXR render times only increased approximately 140% (Editors note: this is not true for the final two shots as well as the path due to the large presence of volumetric fog. Those two shots took 1 hour to render aprox. 150 frames and still has 3 more hours to go), or generally (depending on shot sequence) an increase from about 15 minutes to 37 minutes. Without further ado, the renders:

52GB of renders later...

Class 17 3/3/2025

I do not have a re-rendered cut as of now but I am happy to report there has been a bit of progress over this weekend. The entirety of the project has been migrated from Unreal Engine version 5.3.2 to 5.5.3 for a few key reasons but first the reason why I hadn't done this sooner: Trees. For the life of me the only place to get truly good trees was Megascans which are not compatible with versions beyond 5.3. I tried migrating these assets previously but ran into a lot of issues with materials which I luckily did not this time. 

Now for the reasons for the migration:

• Layered Control Rigs: This feature allows you to layer a control rig on top of an existing animation to make tweaks (in this case, moving the ravens feet up so that they aren't visible in flight.).

• Megalights: I don't currently have a need for them in my project but should I run into issues in the future performance wise during lighting I can enable this feature and trouble shoot from there. I had the opportunity to learn them during this last week for a different project so I do feel fairly confident in using them if need be.

• Updated Lumen/GI: This is a minor one as I'm not even certain the results will be visible in render but to my understanding Lumen has been improved upon in each version of Unreal Engine so I hypothetically should get a slight boost in lighting quality in render.

Migrating my project messed up a lot of the lighting in my project so I also went ahead and updated all the lighting in my project and created a new actor of physics simulated coins piled together to replace the existing textured blobs. Aside from this I updated the ground material in the blacksmith shots to feature nanite and displacement for increased realism and I think I can do the same easily to the well shots and may have found a solution to the footprints shot towards the end of the film. This solution would include modeling a plane and subdividing it into oblivion aided with the power of nanite to then displace it and manually cull the footsteps out of the displacement.

File changes aside I have passed along the recent edit to my sound designer and composer both so that the ball can start rolling in those departments. Aside from sound I now have an animator/illustrator helping out with the intro sequence who is planning to wrap most of their work over spring break. The composer said he will likely be done by week 7 and may have something to show as early as week 10 this quarter or right after spring break. As far as sound design goes, I am discussing with the sound design lead what resources he may need as well as any other teammates etc. 

Class 16 2/26/2025

In this edit The Path™ , well, exterior building shot, river bank, and ending foot print shots have all been updated with new animation and with the latter being extended a bit. Here is the edit:

Class 15 2/23/2025

Alright Here is the newly rendered and retimed edit including some changes to the final shot and some other general experimentation with lighting and fog. I am really whieghing my options at the moment in terms of fog and such and think that there needs to be a balance struck between the first shot in the film, and that of which is seen on the forested path. I want more fog, just not as much as whats in the current path render. Here's the video:

Class 14 2/19/2025

Okay, here is the Retimed (and rendered) cut. Most of the progress aside from the retiming of shots of course was with lighting in the first interior shot, and the overhaul of the path shot which continued since last class. I am playing with the amount of fog and intensity of the light at the moment and I'm reaching something I am happier with generally though there are no highlights currently. I am going to be adjusting my other exterior shots to match this one more closely going forward after I find a good solution for the lack of highlights. I am probably going to look for some lighting reference and then add some additional rect lights to simulate a break in the clouds/fog allowing more light to pass through in certain areas. I am also playing with the idea of the final shot being more sunny as I love the current look with the lens flares etc. but I will experiment with making it more dreary as well and seeing how I feel. Maybe this short juxtaposes it's self and ends on the sunny sky with the two ravens flying away into the distance- heralds of something dark looming in the unsuspecting sunny sky. Without further ado- here is the new Cut: 

Class 13 2/17/2025

An exciting opportunity to send my demo reel to an employer (pending professor approval) came up this Friday so I was a touch delayed on working on this project as I instead spent a bit of time updating said reel, this website (including the URL: D3VFX.com now forwards to this page, not perfect but it works for now), and a new Vimeo account as well which can be found on my demo reel page. that being said here is the updated cut with some minor lighting changes, fog, overhaul of the path scene, and some retimed shots. In class we discussed starting with an 8 second shot and slowly making them shorter in time with music, though I am a bit stuck on how to come out of that progression at the moment as obviously over the course of a minute or so I would run out of time to remove from shot lengths. Here is the current cut: (Shots were stretched to fit the timing desired- Class 14 features shots with retimed animation0

Class 12 2/12/2025

I've been working primarily on my path way shot since class on Monday. The updates include a new forest layout with hand placed and procedurally scattered foliage, repainting of landscape material as well as additional scultping of the landscape, and some new assets were added to the project file to be scattered next. These assets include animal bones and bushes. The bones will be placed on the rock in the mid ground with some other assets to create a roadside altar/offering place as well as shrine. The plan is to try and model or kitbash something together that will resemble the road side shrines of Norway. Here is the updated image with a character for scale:

Aside from that I worked on some administrative tasks in the background like creating a new back up (took about an hour to zip), and some file organization. I want to get a updated cut with retimed shots like discussed in class over the weekend so that I can also send it to my sound designer Xaan and get the ball rolling in that department. Aside from that this shot WILL NOT BE COMPLETE UNTIL A NEW LANDSCAPE MATERIAL IS MADE- looking at this shot as is, is driving me insane and so I would like to make this change sooner than later and now that I split this shot into it's own level I can do that without worrying about breaking other shots. 

A big take away from this project so far is that shots need to be seperated into different levels ASAP for outdoor environments such as this due to the amount of control that is otherwise lost for fear of breaking other shots- in a wider scene the landscape material currently in use is just fine- close up it just doesnt hold up to the level of quality I want in the final product.

Class 10 2/6/2025

Here is the updated class 10 cut!

The main changes made in this edit from the last were the complete redo of the first interior shots with the meeting table, well shot cameras redone, and the river bank sequence was updated with some additional layout and tweaked cameras.

Before getting into the goals for next delivery I want to list out some of the feedback from critique:

• Well light flickering feels out of place at the moment (lighting can be adjusted, sound effects added etc.)

• Grass and landscape material flicker/move at different points (Will make a new landscape material later, can add more engine warm up frames/increase the distance on the grass.culldistancescale variable)

• Asked about the state of the lighting, lighting will be updated at a later date, it is just in a place I am happy with it currently until layout and other priorities are complete.

Now for the goals for the next delivery:

• "Complete" layout (Get layout to a state that it is near complete with only minor changes going forward)

• Meeting with sound designer to discuss the needs in terms of crew etc.

• Add ravens into tree well shot

• resetup the trail shot- going to be redoing this shot from the ground up in a new level

• (longterm goal for end of quarter) new landscape material, may lead to seperating other sequences into new levels- will likely result in re-animation of cameras etc.

Class 8 1/28/2025

Okay so I realized I had my class numbers messed up and that I have a week less to class 10 then I thought. That being said I still feel confident I can get layout and the landscape material where I want them by then. The landscape material got moved to being completed this weekend due to time constraints during the week but I have continued to trouble shoot my motion blue issues as well as worked on the layout a bit focusing predominately on the dock scene and adding more gold and blood throughout the other shots as well. below are some screenshots of the progress.

Class 6 1/26/2025

Class 6 updates include refinements to the raven flight scene at the beginning of the short. Part of my goal with the raven flight shot this weekend was to reach a point that I could call the shot final for most all intents and purposes. To accomplish this I tweaked the PCG forests a bit, added foliage manually with the foliage tool further away from camera where less detail was needed, and I also tweaked the animations on the birds and camera to try and accomplish a more realistic look. Aside from that I added some more fog and played with their animation speeds and opacities. I also ran into render issues with motion blue (namely GPU crashes so this is something I will look into more in the furture for all shots) which currently prevent the rendering of motion blur.

Class 4 and 5 1/26/2025

This is a bit of a late update in terms of the blog but here is the link to my most up to date edit as of class 5: https://youtu.be/y8TtInhpgjQ

The changes made to this edit from what was seen in the previous edit as well as what was previously mentioned in the class 3 post boils down to some camera tweaks, additional blacksmith layout (still needs refining) and an additional sequence taking place on a river bank. In this additional sequence boats with arrows can be seen and it was decided during the critique that these arrows needed to be more evident along with some other clues to the nature of a conflict taking place over the acquisition of this gold. I learned in some research that Vikings did not actually mine for or process gold but rather plundered it and used it as a trophy as well as indicator of wealth. aside from these changes the PCG forest was populated through out the scene with some other minor updates to layout for a few shots. The next major item on the agenda is to create a new landscape material so I can utilize higher quality textures. This also should help eliminate the strange scrolling effect that the current landscape material has in my renders. After that, updating the interior scenes to the updated buildings and further refining layout to get it closer to completion is next on the docket.

Class 3 1/12/2025

PCG work is completed with potential minor updates in the future. At the moment my PCG forest is generated by a volume the shape of a rectangular prism, I may change this to be spline based later so I can eliminate any hard edges. This should be a fairly minor change as I have already created the rest of the node graph and set up the mesh spawner. What I do need to do once I have locked the edit is create a new landscape material so that I can have a higher texture quality as well as flexibility in what the textures are as compared to the current Brushify material I am using. This will make the forest and village scenes look x1000 better I believe. Beside that, I do not have a visual update to the edit at the moment but I have analyzed the current edit and decided on my main areas of focus to address first. Those areas are the blacksmith, forest path, and gold panning scenes I want to add. The forest is the lowest priority of the three as most of it really comes down to the landscape material and layout of foliage as well as the production of an asset (the hanging runes). The gold panning scene needs to be laid out and have the cameras created while the blacksmith is being tweaked and may have an additional shot. By next class I am thinking that the blacksmith additions will be complete and forest tweaks made with some progress on the gold panning.

Images in order: 1 forest after, 2 forest before, 3 PCG graph, 4 PCG forest volumes from above

Class 2 1/8/2025

For this class I do not have much visual progress however I have downloaded one of Epic Games' sample projects showcasing how you can use PCG content "Electric Dreams". I had quite a few meetings and what not which delayed the start of my experimentation but I plan to have completed this weekend along with updating my edit to be finalized next week.