Category: Unreal Engine

This week I worked on animation and rendering. The animation part was quite challenging for me. Many assets, whether downloaded from the official Fab library or other online sources which part often had issues. For example, some models were imported without proper skeletons, only placeholder rigs.

I had a small bird that I wanted to animate in a cute but slightly startling way. I felt the bird alone wasn’t enough, so I also looked for a butterfly material from Fab. When I opened its mesh, I was surprised to find that its body and wings were separate! Even though I searched for tutorial videos to learn how to merge the two bone rigs together, when I tried to import it into the Sequence for animation, it still didn’t work. With time running short, I had to give up on animating the butterfly.

To ensure the rendering quality, I did a test render before adding all the animations. The result was very disappointing, the video looked heavily aliased and jagged… So I adjusted the settings again, following tutorials online. Finally, on my fourth attempt at rendering, I achieved the result I wanted.

Then I continued adding animations. I felt my fairyland scene was missing something magical, so I wanted to add elements like a school of fish flying in the sky, but I couldn’t find the fish model I had in mind, and time was tight. Instead, I used a cute little demon character. At first, I wanted it to follow a spline path in Blueprint, but when I adjusted the coordinates, the spline wouldn’t generate new points correctly. So I had to abandon that idea and just animated and rotated it directly within the camera view instead.

Finally, I worked on camera shake. For a first-person animation with running sections, camera bounce is essential. I looked up how to create a camera shake system in Blueprint online, adjusting the right parameters to get the effect, and placed it into the Sequence. I kept adding shake throughout according to the story’s rhythm, which gave me the final result.

Reference and Process screenshot:

This week, I mainly worked on lighting adjustments and animation, with a focus on lighting. I’ve decided to leave the animation for next week, so I first tried adding volumetric fog and setting up the lights.

The DirectionLight seemed too bright, it actually made the environment I created hard to see, and it overexposed the original colors of the materials, which lost a sense of realism (P1). I then adjusted its position again. This time the color looked more textured, but it was still too intense and a bit exaggerated for my taste (P2).

After that, I followed a tutorial video on setting up ambient light, but I couldn’t get it to look the same as in the tutorial. So I dimmed it down first, went to the ExponentialHeightFog light settings, enabled Volumetric Fog, and kept adjusting the angle and position of the light. I also changed the Intensity Scale of the SkyLight and tweaked it many times. Eventually, the environment looked better, and this is the environment that I chose.

Then, I began adjusting the composition of the scene. To make the upcoming camera animation work better, I angled all the tall trees toward the center to create a visual guiding effect, especially in the initial forest, to build an atmosphere that subtly pushes “you” forward.

At the end of the week, I was feeling pretty confused. So I went to ask my teacher, Serra, for help and feedback. I remember Serra said my story had too much animation, it would be very hard to finish in such a short time. She suggested that I change my story board to a first-person perspective. That way, I’d have less animation to do, and it would help the viewer feel more immersed in the forest atmosphere. I think she made a really good point. For someone newbird to UE5 like me, it’s not about making an amazing story right away—it’s more important to understand and get comfortable with the tools in UE5 (especially since I’m still not very familiar with it, and often don’t even know how to do certain things).

I started feeling more and more anxious, but what’s the use of worrying? I just had to start taking action. Gradually, I noticed the scenes I was building didn’t really match my story anymore. So I decided to change my original story concept. The current version of the story is roughly this:

(First-person view) “I” walk through a dim forest, feeling nervous and scared by the atmosphere, kind of like the forest Snow White runs into when the hunter spares her. There aren’t actually scary creatures in the forest, the fear is just imagination. Then, as I run in panic, I end up lost and stumbling into a beautiful new place by accident.

So I started adjusting my UE5 project accordingly. I also plan to experiment with lighting to make the whole forest feel more atmospheric. But before that, I tried walking through the story in first person view, just to test it out.

Then, to create a sense of mystery while transitioning from the tense forest to the magical forest—just like in my storyboard where a hand emerges from the bushes, followed by a little boy, I placed a large bush at the middle between the two style of forests. This way, it can partially hide the view and help build that feeling of mystery.

While creating the forest, I kept trying different ways to place and adjust materials to make the environment feel vivid and full of life. I grouped plants and flowers using “Ctrl+G‘ and then copied and pasted them，this really helped efficiency up and improve the overall look.

To be honest, working on the same scene for a long time started to feel quite draining and stressful. Sticking too long in one place didn’t actually make the visual result better, so once I roughly finished the fancy forest, I shifted my focus to the stress forest at the beginning of the story.

After completing the afterpart overview, I started building the initial “forest of fear.” This section uses a first person perspective, so visually, I need to create a narrow and dark atmosphere through a crowded environment. To do this, I created a dense forest with closely spaced trees.

Looking at the second image, it still felt far from enough, so I made changes in the Landscape Mode, raising the land higher on both sides, leaving a slightly sunken path in the middle.

I tried using the foliage painting tool to build the tense forest for the earlier part of the story. I thought that to convey tension, the environment shouldn’t feel too open but rather cramped and dim. However, every time I painted using Foliage Mode, the result looked messy and disorganized, whether I used Single mode or tried Erasing after painting, I couldn’t get the tool to work well. The vegetation didn’t “grow” in a visually pleasing or orderly way, and I’m not entirely sure why. So, in many areas, to keep things organized and control the composition better, I ended up manually placing each plant one by one which is the old stupid way.

At the same week I try to learning some lighting set to prepare the next week or after building landscape part, so I watch lots of video on Youtobe, I will attached two of my favorite tutorial.

Here is the Tutorial to create the nervous vibs.

In this week, we leanning the dynamic lighting about how to add the light and built the house to show the light types and change the light color. and I learn a pretty cute name “Lumen”, whichis in Unreal Engine 5 is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflection system designed for next generation consoles. But for me at this moment it is quite hard to use well.

About the homework，I started building the forest scene using Landscape Mode. On the first day, I had no clear idea how to begin, so I referred back to the world map I had drawn earlier and slowly adjusted the material colors and scales.

When I looked at it from a faraway distance, it felt too simple, so I decided to add a stone path. But after searching for a while, I couldn’t find a suitable stone path material. Then, in Fab, I found an ancient Roman style path, but its material was too bright; it almost glowed in the dark(see the picture), and overall it looked too urban and didn’t fit the forest setting.

So I wondered if I could paint my own path instead. I created a Plane and found a pretty good material for it, though I wasn’t sure if the tiling would work well. While learning the tutorials, I came across a nice pond asset and thought: maybe I could combine the path with a small pool, that might look better. So I started setting up a little pond scene.

Then I followed a tutorial to create the water material for the pond, but the material I made turned out green. After looking carefully, I realized the sample color for red wasn’t set correctly, different red reflection actually produce different blues or even greens. I also had to adjust the transparent . Finally, I got the pond and stone path looking the way I wanted.

Reference and New material

This week I began working on my main project. Even though many knowledge point were covered in class, I couldn’t remember everything clearly when I actually started. So I had to learn some skills on my own again. I also ran into several difficulties when I use in my project.

For example, I wanted my terrain to have some hills and slopes, not just be completely flat. So I looked for tutorial videos online (https://youtu.be/ZDD-JMcfEII?si=M4WXiAipYc_fzy2N) about creating terrain. At first, I didn’t understand how to set up a texture blueprint, but luckily there were free tutorial videos that showed internet that I could adjust the roughness, Metallic, ect.

However, the scale of my landscape material was too large at first, the UVs parameter too small and looked very strange. I then found a tutorial video in Blibili that explained how to change the UV settings in the material node. (I found the Landscape Coordinates and adjusted the Mapping Scale. After trying different values, I chose 5, which shows me the effect I wanted.) Then I started placing and editing materials. (Some attached screenshots are in Chinese version，because I temporarily switched to the Chinese version while working. I’ll change it back to English later so everyone can easily to understand.)

After that, I began sculpting the terrain without a clear plan. To be honest, the world of my story isn’t fully clear in my mind yet, but I knew I didn’t want just flat woods—I wanted land with some height changes. So I looked at many references, including works by a concept artist I really like from Bulgaria, Ismail Inceoglu.

Reference of Forest

In this term1’s final homework, I would like to create an “fairy” adventure land. But I realise that my personal skill can not support me to complete the totally huge project, so I need to adjust the size and the making level in UE5, especially for the freshman in the fundamentals.

Original Storyline:

A thin mist filled the air. The ground was wet and shiny. Silver fireflies flew over it. They left golden spots that looked like little stars.
Suddenly, the bushes nearby moved. A hand pushed through the leaves. It opened the bushes, and a small sprite appeared. She wore soft pink and blue clothes. Her silver hair was in two pigtails. Her big eyes looked around. Then she stepped out.
She walked on the wet brick path. It reflected the light. There were small puddles and some weeds. Little flowers swayed as she passed.
With every step, the fog grew thicker. She heard strange sounds—like water gurgling and the wind whispering. She felt scared and walked faster, holding her map tightly.
Everything turned dark. Black eyes seemed to move around her. Shadows flew past—but they were only birds.
Then, under a lamp, a scary shadow appeared. She was surprised to see it was just a small rabbit.
But the moonlight lit her way… so she began to run.
Again and again, she pushed through tall grass and trees.
Then the fairy’s view opened up. It was a beautiful moonlit night. Everything sparkled.

STORY BOARD

Character

In this week’s class, I talked to Sarra about my project process, actually, I still feeling confused about my story, including the character. Though the 1-1 feedback talk, I am so appreciat with Sarra, she helps me clarify my storyboard. She said I need to lock on my story, I truly realise my story always changes, and there are so many characters who need to do the animation, it will be quite heavy for the left one month.

In this class, we learned how to use the parent ball set to change the materials inside create the child ball, and more.

At the beginning, I only wanted to make a pure background in UE for homework, but when I talked to sarra, she told me that maybe this is not enough for a simple project, because there should be a character inside the story, so that the story will be more vivid. She asked me to add an actor even if he is in first view mode in the unreal.

Here is my concept about the final homework in this terms. These are inspirational pictures in my imagination.

this is the end of the story in the character view. This is like a fairy land

In this week, we leaned how to change the materials and setting a materials.

In the material map. I leaning about plus 123 and left click with different functions. If you want to change the materials that you need to adjust something, let the PBR ( Physically based rendering) looks better.

Tips of the words:

Base color: adjust the material’s color light spectrum and change parameter. like RGB

Roughness: change the furface of material, soft or rough, even use in road looks like wet.

Metallic: Sometimes it can be used to create building effects, or for objects with metal-like materials, you can increase the relevant parameters.

Sometimes you create the bluemap in materials, you can just drag the texture into bluemap, which will autocreate directly texture sample. and the G matches the Roughness, B matches the Metallic, R corresponds to Ambient Occlusion.

if you don’t want to connect this part, just plus “Alt and click it ” that bluemap will separate.

I just remenber plus 1 and left click will come out a texture sample, and 2,3 will match the difference function of tools.