Greetings and salutations readers!
In this final update of 2023, I will share all the final details about our film's prep work for the preview screening, and the overall outcome of that event.
For starters, on Sunday night, I intended to begin work on importing a team member's model of the abduction bay set into Unreal and rig the necessary parts. However, upon opening the scene, I found issues ranging from unintended duplicate geometries, non-manifold objects, no naming conventions, and references to characters and props that were not part of the model. After removing and cleaning up that file, what was left was an inverted half sphere, a couple blocked out cylinders, some privimitive control panels and chairs, the first floor quad-drawn mesh I created, and the iris I made.
Now, at this point in time, I made a choice that was not necessarily the most tactful way of addressing the problem, but it was something needed for the film. My teammate had spent months working on this set, in addition to the shot blocking and other schoolwork that took priority. However, the amount of work accomplished in the set was not enough for me to make any tangible lights or motivate the cameras in a way that could show off the character in relation to the space. I chose, in the two to three days I had available, to overhaul and standardize the set with the other sets that I had created for the film. While this understandably caused some frustration and anger, ultimately after talking about why this was needed, we came to an understanding and there was no lingering resentments.
The work I did on the set consisted of booleaning out windows, light fixtures, and doors in the dome, using sweep mesh to create a more interesting pillar blocking, replacing all the blocked control panels with a symmetrical and evenly spaced blocking, adding doors to the first floor of the set, rebuilding the abduction ray device from scratch, and adding in trim lights on different areas for emission purposes. Here is a before and after of the set:
After I modeled everything, I split the abduction ray device, iris, and first floor objects off into their own scenes, and created rigs for all of them, using Advanced Skeleton to get them read for Unreal. Everything got imported into Unreal, and I assigned mostly white flat textures to the set. I added some basic glass to the windows and to the spotlight covers, I added pure white emissive materials to the bulbs, and purely reflective materials to the bulb covers. I intended for these lights to serve as massive spotlights such as the ones in football stadiums.
The frustrating part of textures and the lighting of the set is that the glass's IOR and magnification effects caused the light bulbs to warp so aggressively that the camera couldnt see the bulbs 90% of the time. To counter this, I chose to flood the area with big rectangular lights and create some god rays for them. In order to get the effect across, I tried making just a Substrate Fog material. However, using primitive geometries doesnt work, since the fog uses square voxels that arent easy to customize. So, I then followed a tutorial online to create a more adaptable fog using a Niagra particle system. This methodology worked, but not well enough unfortunately.
The problem with the fog system is that the fogs and the lights took time to warm up in order to create the occlusion that was needed. I repurposed this technique to the beam of light that surrounds our character in the abduction ray. So when I hit render, and the shots started working, it took x amount of frames for the fog to arrive, and by the time the rays had reached their intended density, the job was over. I have yet to find a solution for this problem, so I will have to keep tinkering with this system or find an alternative.
With all that being said, here is what the set looked like after it was fully assembled in Unreal:
My apologies for the render quality of this image, it is from the working viewport.
After all this was set up, the only remaining part of the process for our group was to drop in our animations, create some rough three point lightings for the characters, and to render out the frames and put them through Nuke to go into the master cut.
There were a lot of different miscellaneous tasks that I worked on in the final two days, from chasing down render issues, to tweaking animation lengths and making some quick credits.
After we got our film in a good place, we submitted it to our production professors, and got to watch it on a movie theater screen on campus with an audience of peers, family members, and friends. The majority of the comments were focused on audio mistime issues, which came about from having repurposed the sound from the storyboard without making any edits, and a couple notes on the brightness of the character in certain shots. Overall, it was highly received, and we should be getting written comments about the film soon!
It has been a good semester working together with my friends on this film, and I know that over the next semester, we will polish this film into something both beautiful and funny. This post will be my last for a month or so, but I look forward to sharing more updates about BSG when we return in January!
Thank you so much for your time reading through this, and until next time!
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