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October 2022 - May 2023
Individual Project: Modeling, Texturing, Rendering, Compositing
This landscape set was created in my junior year at CU Denver as part of an asset creation for Unreal Engine class. For this project, we were tasked with creating an original landscape with a man-made focal point object/objects, foliage that responds to wind, and a camera zoom movement rendered in Unreal Engine 5. I chose to re-interpret one of my favorite games Portal 2 from a dim interior facility into a brightly lit exterior building overlooking a calm river.
Shot Breakdown
All hard surface models were authored in Maya, using in-game screenshots as reference for the different props and textures. The textures were created using Adobe Substance Painter and Photoshop, with some additional texture resources used from Quixel Megascans. The terrain was created using a combination of Maya and Zbrush, before being converted into an Unreal Engine landscape for additional refinements. The vegetation was created using Speedtree 7 for Games, with the trees and bushes starting as SpeedTree library assets before being modified into the varieties shown. Ground-cover such as rocks, small leaves, and branches scattered were downloaded from Quixel Megascans.
Rendering Exploration
When I submitted my final render of this project for my class, I had very little knowledge about cinematic rendering in Unreal Engine, and there were a lot of problems that were visible in my submission. Below is the original zoom out that I submitted, and you can see the various technical challenges that I had to overcome.
Original Render
Comparison Render
Problems in the original render included the shadows having tiled "preview" labels in them, extremely dark patches on the right island, trees blurring in the wind without motion blur enabled, and square artifacts where foliage was hanging over the water. With all the time and effort I spent invested in this project, the final submission was a rather humiliating outcome. In order to fix my project, I focused on learning several different systems that I didn't see in the Unreal class.
The first system that I focused on was the use of console variables and start up variables to over-ride the real-time settings in Unreal. Many of my problems with the foliage were a result of denoisers and limits imposed on the renderer to complete frames quickly instead of fully resolve pixels in the renderer.
Next, I had to understand the difference between the temporal and the spatial samples, and how they worked together in Unreal Engine. With a background primarily in Arnold, a lot of my understanding of sampling was from the camera AA's or the sampling strength given to different elements such as diffuse vs transmission. In Unreal, the spatial samples and temporal samples are rendering different pieces, with the temporal samples being directly multiplied by the spatial sample quantity to produce a higher fidelity image. This allowed me to fix the lighting from static to dynamic, and resolve a lot of the darker sections of the image that were not given enough time.
The most important tool that I discovered however, was a plugin created by Foundry for NukeX called UnrealReader. Prior to the rework of the deferred rendering system of Unreal 5.4, there was very limited AOV/Stencil support for UE 5. And with the rendering tools, if using Stencil layers, objects that occluded background objects would still cut out those renders even if not visible in the render, rendering those passes worthless.
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Because of this tool, I was able to use Nuke to composite the rack focus, color correct the water, and layer different render passes with unique wind movements that previously wouldn't have been possible using Unreal's native rendering kit. This process of discovery took roughly five additional months of work, but gave me the solid Unreal Engine foundation I needed in order to lead my senior thesis team while using UE 5.
Behind the Scene Screenshots
Cryptomatte Pass
Depth Pass
Sign 2 Textures
Cryptomatte Pass
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