Greetings and salutations readers. It has been roughly three weeks since my last post, due to a production pass and Spring Break coming and going. Here is our team's status and goals for the coming weeks.
During our production pass, we received a lot of feedback on the interior of the spaceship. Specifically, about visually unifying the operation room with the abduction bay, and making it more complex. Since the interior designs are still in flux, we are going to get started on assets and work that is not inside the space ship. Some of our teammates are building the base meshes for our characters. We are researching how to make a highly detailed Earth model. And we are working on sound for our animatic to play throughout the video. This past week for me has been full of different experiments in order to figure out our Unreal pipeline later.
The first main project I was working on was how to render AOVs out of Unreal Engine efficiently. Thanks to coming across a plugin called Unreal Reader, that task has been completed easily. The plugin is super easy to use, and works with the rendering method that I previously researched.
My home license of NukeX expired as part of the school's renewal, so once I have it back I can use it to work on rack focuses and layering effects. The school computers aren't on version 14 of Nuke yet, which Unreal Reader is only available for UE 5.1 for version 14. Overall, this plugin will be extremely useful towards the end of the short film.
The other project I was working on was experimenting with an pearlescent material for the shape ship's interior. After some experimentation with a car automotive material and a bubble material tutorial, I was able to create a texture that looked like this:
The base material is white, but as the normals turn parallel to the camera, a rainbow hue shift is introduced to them. The issue however, comes from its ultimate purpose on the ship. This material is intended to serve as a cover of sort, a diffuser over a different texture. We want our ship to have glowing lines of energy originating out of certain parts of the ship. A concept that I have attached below.
With the pearlescent material created, it is pretty impossible to see materials underneath it. And as you lower the opacity of this pearlescent material, it darkens and shadows the surface below it.
A possible solution to this is to have two sets of textures, one being the pearlescent material and one being the glowing network material, and then using compositing to overlay the two into a unified substance. However, this would require some extra time to accomplish. The team has been leaning towards a more mechanical and "greebled" look for the spaceship, so there's a chance that the pearlescent material wouldn't fit in that new vision.
My projects for the upcoming week are a slight shift, where I will be spending more time modeling one of the assets on Earth, our protagonist's 1984 Peterbildt 359 truck, and testing out a camera move for the intro sequence as we fly through Space to Earth. Thanks for reading, and until next time!
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