Final renders

Link to my final cinematic for A3D module, because it didn't accept bigger than 100mb file size:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogqROBp0V9E

Underground crypt after adding some skeletons, candles, dirt piles, skulls on the ground and most importantly cobwebs. There must be cobwebs in this kind of the scene, they were actually quite easy to make aswell using a flat black/white texture on a flat plane.

Finally you can see the Undead banners glowing purple, added couple candles on the ground around it and cobwebs around the corners. The background filled trees and nice full moon sky.

 I've put that lantern there just because I thought it looked really nice from this point of view, it's actually floating on that wooden beam but you can't see it in the cinematic and it gives a nice feel that someone might be living here. Or not really because their Undead.(didn't plan the pun)

Another nice shot, tried to grab a nice view of my firefly particle effect.

The YouTube link is private for now, I will try to work on the ending scene in my spare time. As this video ends camera flying into that grave I want to make it fly though the ground into small underground room with a nice sculpted coffin with my name, website and YouTube channel. Most likely it will be very broken and old coffin that you would expect to be in Undead area, before was humans of course so I have some reference on google images. I plan to do it for this winter break, at least model and sculpt everything.
Was not on the initial plan but I thought that would make it look more professional and I saw quite a few people including that in their scene and cinematic. I think this themed 3d artist-like outro would be nice finish for the scene.

Post alpha

In the last 2-3 weeks I was trying to fill the inside of the underground bit was making some candles and particle effects, worst part that you can't really see them or especially see candle fire jumping slightly and light flickering. Placing multiple candles on the shelves and pretty much on anything that had a flat surface, actually filled the scene very well and gave that atmosphere that i wanted. no sreenshot sorry.


The worries I had about this place from blockout stage that it would be hard to hide. This place is a hole in landscape because of the underground crypt.

In week 11 my course mate Adam Butler came up to me when I was just starting to work on it and told me that I can just use a second small landscape and sculpt it so it blends nicely, cover with some grass and match the landscape vertex pant. I was worrying about this part the whole project after blockout stage but I fixed it in like half an hour.

Alpha presentations

Video from my alpha presentation

As you can see from the video, outside area was quite empty. I already had textures and ready and basic grass with textures. So it didn't take too long to round it up. The sky sphere was also close to finished.

Main changes needed after the presentation was to make everything much lighter, that was quite easy to make through world settings just adjusting global illumination.

My presentations first slide was this and Rob said it looked professional so I guess I'll take that as a compliment, not sure if it was throughout the whole presentation.

couple other screenshots

PBR

PBR aka Physically based rendering is one of the more advanced technologies for materials and textures. Basically it uses multiple texture nodes in material editor to get a natural materials such as plastic, gold, rust or anything.

• Base color
• Roughness
• Metallic
• Specular

Those 4 points are the pieces required to make PBR materials. Base color is the simple albedo/diffuse texture as it was used before. Roughness map is always greyscale, black being very smooth and reflecting light, while white color is rough which wont reflect any light. With roughness textures you can get nice reflections and gives object more of a realistic look. Metallic maps are used to make metal materials, that reflect light very similar how real life metals does. I haven't used Specular that much and not exactly sure how it works, it is another way to bent lighting on the objects.

Particles

I spent a lot of time doing and researching particle effects. Watched multiple tutorials about fire tutorials. Making particle effects in UE4 is actually not that difficult as at start it seems, after watching some tutorials I realized its pretty much just a flying textures. In particle editor you use created materials as flying around textures and control their movement, speed, color, size, number. It can get quite complicated but its mostly just changing numbers and adding more nodes with more numbers.
Materials is another part for particle effects, you can use simple materials but simple PBR haven't really worked in any sort of particle for me.
I added the fire particles I've done in my showreel, also made candle and firefly particles but those were really simple so didn't bother putting in a showreel.

Refining the idea / Blockout

Blockout stage was the main step for this environments. Used matinee tool in UE4 to make cinematic somewhat similar to the finished one so I can see what I have to pay more attention making and where I can completely ignore. In this stage I mainly tried to get the atmospheric feel of this level, I wanted to make it very dark/realistic night time as it is undead starting area so I tried to make it dark and maybe somewhat scary.

    

Undead starting area

I picked Undead race starting area from WoW, my favorite of those locations. Also said to be the best starting area in the game by most people. 

Finaly decided to make the underground crypt, and the way to the first town. In the end I think it was too ambitious to also do the town.