Weekly progress 1/19
This week I mainly did the following:
1. Basically complete the material of acorn.
2. Learn to use the UE4 animation system and complete the dynamic split lens.
3. Successful use of megascan for digital asset creation.
4.Soundtrack production.
Approach
After a lot of trial and error, I gave up the last week’s production method and used the shapmapper node to make the ring structure.
Since I didn’t think I had enough time, I decided to use a Substance Painter to do the detail adjustments. Fully procedural textures take more time to produce, so use this method to increase production efficiency.
After adjusting in the Substance Painter, I added wood textures and generated AO maps by height to make it more realistic and detailed.
In UE4 I made further adjustments to make the acorn look more complicated. I originally planned to use only normal maps and random sculpting to achieve the bumpy effect. But such a scheme seems to have no depth. So I imported the height map made in the Substance Designer as a displacement map.
And by the way deepened the AO effect.
I learned and used the Sequencer system for animation. I made camera animation and acorn landing animation. I should thank myself for not completely forgetting my undergraduate animation knowledge. Sequencer is very similar to AE’s animation system, which reduced some difficulties for me.
I learned and made the texture of the ground in a quexel mixer. I added some detail to the cracked ground and adjusted the height to reduce the stretch of the texture.
It took some time to properly restore this material in UE. I added parameters such as color and height to the material instance to help me adjust the actual effect.
I got clover from Quixel’s library. But it is three leaves. For luck, I changed it to four leaves in Photoshop.
Last week I learned that I need a soundtrack, so I wrote 15 seconds of music by myself. It looks very simple but I feel very satisfied. I matched the rhythm of the music with my recording as much as possible.
Next steps and problems:
- Adjust camera animation.
- Complete clover animation.
- Ground material used at the end of the production.
- AE composite all material, (Lens editing and fade-in need to be done in this part.)
- Color grading and lens adjustments.
