Greetings and salutations readers! This week, I made some fun progress on multiple different sections of the short film, so here is what went down.
Firstly, I spent some time researching the new material system Strata for Unreal Engine 5.3. Our short film intends to use a lot of glass and specular materials with dirt layers on them, and having the new and improved shading system for our short film will be incredibly useful to our pipeline. I intend to publish a guide for the rest of my production group on my findings after I make some test glass materials and try the new overlaying system.
The next major project that I worked on was the planetary zoom out shot for our intro sequence. In our animatic, we exit from a "lightspeed" warp to outer space over Earth, and zoom into the Earth until eventually we reach our gas station in Nebraska. For this particular shot, I am using Terragen 4, and the planet geometry is sized to actual size of Earth. This scale while seeming extreme in nature, is easier than trying to cheese the size of Earth since Terragen is designed to make nature realistic terrains and atmospheres. The main challenge was not being able to bring the planet and the camera into Maya and working with it in the viewport.
Terragen as a program is certainly an older one, and the animation graph editor was certainly challenging to get used to. When I was animating my first iterations of the zoom in, I would key frame the start and end position, and then watch as the camera would spin around and wobble without reason. The issue largely came down to the extreme size of the units that were changing every frame, and the lack of curve tangent controls in the graph editor. So my work-around from using the Terragen camera was to export the Terragen camera out as an FBX file, import it into a Maya scene, and use the Maya Graph Editor to control the curve and the smoothing of the tangents. However, I could not see the impacts of my changes in Maya, since the Editable Motion Trails and the viewport weren't designed to handle such extreme changes in movement, so I would have to re-import my camera after baking the animation into Terragen. If the curve needed more tweaking, I would randomly grab the keyframes in Terragen and shift them around until I figured out what I needed to tweak in Maya to get my desired result. I rinsed and repeated this process repeatedly until I got a final product that looked good.
Initially, I had the camera curve into the Earth and go from a horizontal view of the Earth to a top view of the gas station in the Earth, but after some critique from my team, I changed it so that the camera zooms in at a linear rate while the Earth rotates into position for us to zoom into. Here is what the most recent iteration looks like.
In addition to the camera work, I also made some further progress on the Earth's terrain itself. The previous version of the Earth had a simple 42k displacement map on it, which was enough high resolution for a planetary level shot. For our film though, we zoom into North America and past the Rocky Mountains before arriving at our final destination. Given this specificity, we needed a higher resolution displacement map for our Earth. While 42k sounds like a pretty high resolution, when stretched across the globe, the North American continent was in reality only really getting 4-8k of resolution from that map.
To fix this, I purchased a 172k displacement map of the Earth for $25 from the same place that I got the free 42k displacement map. However, this 172k map was split into 32 pieces, and attempting to assemble more than 4 pieces into a singular photoshop file would cause the computer's scratch disks to fill up with over 100 gb of data and block any attempts at saving. Fortunately, I was able to assemble together 4 of those chunks into a singular 42k displacement map of North America.
Despite having the higher resolution map, I didnt really have a way to control the placement of the map upon the surface of the globe. The 42k global map was simply placed on the entire surface of the earth and used a simply spherical projection. Thankfully, with some help from Planetside staff in the Terragen official Discord server, I was able to setup a proxy Latitude/Longitude system, and calculate the Lat/Long of each corner of the North American map and overlay it seamlessly with the global displacement map. Since the 42k North America map was crashing the scene, I downscaled it by half to 21k and then overlay a 21k Midwestern map using a crop of the 42k map to get our target resolution in the area that we want. Similarly, I can now overlay the 62k basemap over the North American continent instead of the 42k global map using a similar process.
All of that is a very long-winded rant about textures, but here is what our daytime Earth looks like right now with a simple atmospherics system.
As soon as the camera zoom in is finalized, we can use that camera motion in this scene to create a beautiful zoom in effect. Additionally, the way that Terragen exports geometry is based on what the camera sees, so once the camera is finished, we can export that terrain section out of Terragen and into Unreal Engine for further landscaping and scene assembly. Then the only things left to focus on are the night-time texture maps and the clouds.
Enough about Terragen though, what else did I do this week? Our team has been struggling with the facial aesthetic of our aliens, and getting our existing mesh to align in character with the drawings from the storyboards. Here is what our aliens' heads looked like previously:
The character has a somewhat unsettling appearance, and they seem more menacing and threatening then indifferent and empty headed like we wanted. So I worked with an extremely talented sculptor from the Mothman thesis film and we created a new alien bust that looks like this:
While I cannot take credit for the physical sculpting of most of this new design, we worked together to create a new aesthetic for the aliens with better anatomy and considerably cuter appearance. Watching these guys indifferently eat snacks and listen to Never Gonna Give you up is definitely a lot easier than the aliens of our previous design.
And with all that being said, here is what I look forward to for the coming week. Our professors have prodded us in the direction of getting assets into Unreal Engine for blocking. Therefore, this week, I will be beginning the export process for the gas station set I have been building and setting up our first couple of shots as levels within the project. I will aim to finish all the camera movement adjustments in Terragen, and import that into our beauty planet. Finally, I hope to retopologize a photogrammetry head of a professor for one of the gags on Earth. Thank you so much for reading through this entry, and until next time!
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