Greetings readers. For this week, our team finalized another version of the animatic, and completed a first iteration of white-boxing for the environments in the shorts. As we approach our second production pass, we have achieved all of our goals regarding look development and story, and we sit on the cusp of the real modeling necessary for the short.
My personal project this week was a continuation of texture tests in Unreal Engine, and a test conducted with the animatic regarding aspect ratio.
As some background context, our ship will have a white, almost ethereal interior, where the weaponry and large devices on the ship are powered by vials of yellow energy visible throughout the rooms. My job is to create a texture concept that allows us to have yellow webs of power travel through our different asset, and specifically to create it for Unreal Engine. Now, I have been using a previous project of mine to test glass/translucent materials in Unreal Engine, and have been experimenting with automotive vs cinematic Unreal. Originally, I was working under a notion that the automotive unreal had a more sophisticated rendering system for reflections and glass, through use of materials from the Epic Marketplace designed for car renders. However, after some experimentation, I was able to achieve near identical results for the car bodies between both Unreal modes. The issue I am currently working through is rebuilding the glass master shader from the automotive mode in the cinematic mode. There's a particular function node, which happens to be a web of smaller nodes itself, that don't copy one to one between these modes. While the network is reproducible, I will need to continue experimenting on both modes to see whether or not they can be truly identical. As a success, I did figure out how to create animated textures with multiple character sheets, so I am able to create long looping animations without losing image resolution.
My alternate project this week was experimenting with aspect ratio for our film. So far, our film's animatic uses a standard HD ratio of 1280 x 720. While feeling inspired by some films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Grand Budapest Hotel, I wanted to experiment with having a changing aspect ratio in our film as well. My rationale was that our short follows this formula of building tension, dropping tension completely, and then spiking quickly to a lot more drama and action. An example is going from a dramatic camera journey through space to Earth, cutting randomly to the occupied sign, and then our main character getting abducted. I wanted to use an aspect ratio adjustment which would have gone to 16:9 to create extra intensity during these moments, to really focus the viewer on the center of the frame. I edited a version of the animatic together, and showed it to my team to get their feedback. The idea of the transitions was not agreed upon, my teammates found it distracting and not a strong enough rationale to justify it. However, the idea of using a 16:9 aspect ratio by default was well received, and will be something that can be reflected on in a future iteration of the storyboard.
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