This marks the end of my journey of creating my Capstone project for my final year at school. I definitely learned a lot, and overall i am really happy with my final result. I knew that recreating this piece as a 3D environment provided an opportunity to learn how to do a stylized, hand-painted environment, and learning how to do that kind of artwork was something I had always wanted to do. It was a considerable challenge, but a good one in the end.

In my capstone, I was able to take a step further into stylized art and learn about stylized pbr. This project allowed me go from painting all the details to also learning to sculpt and dive into programs like Zbrush, which was probably the biggest learning hurdle of my Capstone.

Including highpoly sculpts in the pipeline affected the entire process, and I had to learn how to make my lowpoly models ready to sculpt on so they wouldn’t lose their shape, to sculpt different types of materials, and also to export the models and get a clean bake to paint on. I spent a ton of hours learning to prep my models, fix my low polys so that they worked, and even more time was spent learning how to sculpt the correct materials in a stylized way.

My mailbox was the first object to test this method on, and i am the most proud of it compared to the other objects in the scene.

The other big milestone that was part of this project was the water. I knew when I set out to make this scene that I wanted to learn how to make my own water material. I detailed that entire process on this blog, so we all know how that turned out. I still wish i could have gotten the tessellated splash and foam to work how i originally planned, but i am satisfied with the end result none the less.

Next time, I’d like to do more in-depth pre-production on my concept so that I can really analyze the angles and heights of all the objects, so I can better prepare my 3D models and how they will work together in my scene. I didn’t really do that before I started this, and I think doing so prior to modelling will help me figure out a clearer idea of what shapes and angles I need to replicate the concept art, as the only other issue i had during the production of this piece was getting the correct angles of the house and environment sections (stairs, bridge, peninsula) to truly be a replica of the concept art.

Overall, I’m quite proud with how my project turned out, and i am really excited to move forward from school and continue to make really cool 3D art that i can be proud of!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My final section that i added for the water in the scene was foam rushing down the waterfall. The material is pretty simple; I don’t quite remember if i followed a tutorial or if i just played with nodes that i learned about previously? Regardless, here it is;

The material is set to translucent and the lighting mode is Surface Translucency Volume.

So basically i used the cloud texture again, and multiplied it with a colour parameter for the base colour. The metallic and roughness are the same values used as the water material. I also added an emissive to get the mist to be a bit brighter.

Finally, for the opacity i made the radial blend texture in photoshop by just selecting the middle with a circle marquee and feathering the edges, then filling the background with black. This way the material doesn’t have sharp square edges when filtering through the particle system.

The particle system is as follows;

Spawn: 50

Lifetime: Min: 0 Max: 20

(I had this set to a different number originally, and it was causing the particle to not appear in the scene during “play mode”. I set it to match my mist particle system and that allowed it to appear in play mode again. I have no idea why it was doing this).

Initial Size: Max: XY: 2000 Z: 1000 Min: XYZ: 500

Initial Velocity: Max: XY: 50 Z: -100 Min: XY: -10 Z: -50

Acceleration: Max: XY: 0 Z: -500 Min: XY: 0 Z: -250

Colour over life is the same

I also have a sphere location added but i don’t think its doing anything? regardless, the constant is set to 100.

Here is the result;

I actually started running into issues once i added the foam particles to the waterfalls. Basically, the ones farthest away wouldn’t show up except at the particle spawn point (they wouldn’t fall). Also, sometimes the particles would disappear out of view from the camera depending on how i moved it. From searching the web i learned it was probably the bounds doing this, but changing the numbers really large had no effect.

Upon watching

Intro to Cascade: Creating a GPU Sprite Emitter | 05 | v4.2 Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine

 

I learned that i should have added “set fixed bounds” under the bounds drop down instead of the changing the value myself. This allowed for the particles to stop disappearing out of view, however, it changed all of my particles into only appearing at the particle spawn point. Nothing flowed down.

It took a bit of searching but i finally realized that it was just unreal messing up the translucent camera order once again. Luckily, theres a setting on the meshes and particles themselves where you can set the order yourself. My waterfall meshes remained at 0, the foam i changed to 1 (and they all appeared, hurray!), the mist i changed to 2, and my glass jars in the scene i changed to 3. This way everything was visible.

 

In my concept, the scene has a bunch of foam running down the waterfall, and mist rolling throughout the scene. I went to youtube to see if i could find a cool tutorial on it. I found one that set up a nice material, and i used that to make the mist particles.

Unreal Engine 4 Atmospheric Fog FX Setup demo

by Dokipen

The material is set to translucent and the lighting mode is surface translucency volume. Here’s the material graph;

I added this material to a particle system.

In the Spawn tab, i set the distribution constant to 500.

Lifetime is set to min: 0 and max: 20

Initial size: Max: X:3000 Y: 3000 Z: 3000 Min: X: 300 Y: 300 Z: 300

Initial Velocity: Max: X: 400 Y: 400 Z: 500 Min: X: -500 Y: -500 Z: – 500

I kept colour over life turned on.

I also added Actor Collision so the house wouldn’t get overwhelmed by smoke

Here is the result in my scene;

In my next post ill talk about the waterfall foam i add, which basically completes the water section of my scene.

 

 

While i was working on making the waterfalls for the scene, i managed to figure out how to warp the caustic lines. Hurray! the graph has gotten significantly bigger but i am really happy with the result.

So, basically what i did was i got a black and white cloud texture,  added the same panner settings as i did previously to the caustic textures, and figured out how to add it all in to the graph together. It took a bit of tinkering, but i managed to figure out how to add it altogether, while adding functionality like size and speed so i could play with it as a material instance.

Here’s the graph;

Basically, i started with the cloud texture which serves as the distortion effect. It runs into a multiply with a scalar parameter so i can control the size of the distortion. That runs into the section with the texture coordinate of for the caustic image (im only using one caustic texture this time, the previous water still uses two). The two panner parameters above the graph run into an add node that allow me to control the speed of the caustics, and the scalar parameter sitting under the texture coordinate node is for the size of the caustic lines.

After this, i also used a darker cloud texture to add foam running down the waterfall. The texture coordinate node is also running into that. Heres the graph;

The mist is added to the caustic sections with an Add node, and then the material continues on into how the water material was set up previously, with the colour nodes and foam lines. Heres a picture of the entire graph;

This is all still plugged into the emissive node. The rest of the waterfall material was the same as the water, I just played around with the speed of things in a material instance so i could get what i was looking for. I also stretched the uvs on the waterfall meshes themselves for the lines would get stretched vertically to make it look more like falling water.

Here is the final result;

In my next post, ill detail how i added mist and foam to the scene.

 

 

 

So iv made a bunch of changes to the water material in order to fit into my capstone image. Iv kept the base colour section and the movement sections the same, but after watching a few UE4 water videos i made a few changes.

UE4 – Tutorial – Water Planes! by Dean Ashford

I watch this video by Dean Ashford and made the following changes;

I added a constant to the metallic and roughness sections to change the sheen of the material. I also added a normal map, and like explained in the video, added the motion 4way chaos nodes (found in engine content) to the graph to create movement and offset them to make it appear more random.

I used the normal map from the video itself, though overall i think i will change it to something a big larger just because it looks too small to be water that is being hit by a ton of waterfalls.

I am happy with the normal section however, because it creates a nice light effect when the sun hits it that really makes it feel like water;

Now to move on to the caustics.

The caustics from my previous blog post works really well in smaller bodies of water. However, once placed in a large area like my capstone, the repeating texture of the caustics just looked really noticeable. I was hoping to try and find a way to break it up more.

After doing some research, I found the water videos from the Rime game team. Not only did I get great information on how to make stylized waterfalls, I also learned how they made their water look more natural and random in its movement.

GAT #67: Stylized VFX in RIME 2.0 – Water Edition by Simonschreibt

 

So, i began editing my caustic section of the material. Here is what i started with from before;

What i did first was take the caustic texture and made a larger version of it so i had the original and the larger one. I started plugging in panner’s with the x and y moving at different speeds. I removed the motion4way chaos altogether, as it wasnt playing nicely with both the textures and was causing really strange glowing effects to occur. At one point, i turned the entire water material into a rainbow. Luckily with the help of my classmate, we were able to figure out how to plug in the panners to get it to work.

Heres a screenshot of what i was just talking about;

I have two parameters connected to an append that goes into the first panner so i can control the speed in the material instance later on. The bottom panner speed is 0.003 for Speed X and 0.005 for Speed Y.

I also added a colour to the caustic lines so i could change the colour in the material instance, and kept the caustic intensity parameter. As well, once again with the help from my classmate, we added a sort of “foam” type of colour to the waters edge. This whole section is plugged into the emissive colour node.

Heres the whole graph;

And the result;

It still doesnt distort quite how i want it too, but at least now it doesn’t look like a solid image moving slowly across the plane. The emissive fades in and out instead which helps break it up.

 

Since the water in the tree basin retains a magical quality, i wanted some particle effects to accompany it. Due to time, i made these pretty simple, but i am happy overall with the result.

Theres 3 particle effects associated with the water, one being the soft yellow orbs that float around the water as a whole. The second is the tear-drop shaped particle flowing down the overflow, accompanied by the smaller bright blue orbs.

To back track a bit here; i got the tear-drop shape image from the candle flame particle i created earlier, which i painted in photoshop. I changed the orange yellow colours to blue in unreal.

The small dots were a coloured orb i quickly painted in photoshop as well. This image was also used for the yellow orbs as well.

I played around with the settings within Unreal Engines Cascade, changing the speed, lifetime, and how many particles it produces until i was happy with the result.

 

For the Blizzard Art Contest, my “hero object” of the scene was the tree growing in the center of the composition. Within it, the remaining well water still magically flows. So for the scene i had to find a way to create a water material that would kind of match blizzards simplicity.

The moonwell water kind of glows a turquoise colour so i also had to make it seem like it was glowing. Here’s a close up;

Basically, i modeled the shape the water sits in, and the overflowing part is a part of the mesh. On top of that, i created some particle effects to accompany the overflowing part to enhance the idea.

So i started with researching water for Unreal Engine 4, and sifting through all the results. I found a small blog of someone else’s experience making stylized water for games, and it ended up being a good match for the style i was going for.

Here’s the blog; https://jesshiderue4.wordpress.com/materials/stylized-water-material/

I pretty much followed her instructions, however i did not use the individually animated caustic sections, as the water i was making was pretty small and it didn’t really change its effect much. Here’s the graph;

The settings I tweaked to suit my project were as follows in my material instance;

CausticSpeed – 0.27619

Diffuse Multiply – 0.109921

Scalar (Caustic Size) – 200.00

 

So, I’d like to introduce my Blizzard Student Art contest submission; The Broken Moonwell.

During one of the blizzcon’s, I was really inspired by the concept art that they showed the attendee’s of Teldrassil burning down. I think it was a really emotional story move to make, and Teldrassil was definitely a location I always was fond of. So when it came time for me to create something for the contest, I wanted to make something that I could be passionate about.

As the events of the burning of Teldrassil unfolded around the time of the contest (and the battle for Darkshore), i developed my idea to sort of be the aftermath of the war going on. I wanted to create a sort of quiet place of remembrance and mourning, but also include Elune (the moon goddess) since shes a major player for the Night Elves.

My idea is that the night elves gathered around one of the remaining moonwells in Darkshore to sort of mourn their loss. Elune, wanting to be a part of the moment, used the well’s powers to grow a tree, a symbol of life. In the process the well breaks (and is sort of a metaphor for all they’ve lost). So overall story-wise i was going for a juxtaposition of loss and life, which i feel stories of war really bring about.

Overall, i went from attempting to paint rocks to painting an entire scene for the first time. I definitely learned a lot, and it was lots of fun. In total, i created this scene within 4 weeks while doing my other coursework.

Everything was modeled in maya 2018, and everything except for the center tree was painted in Photoshop. The main tree was painted in substance painter once i figured out how to use it better for hand painted textures. The tree itself took a full 24 hours to paint, that i spread across two days.

Overall i am really happy with the result, though i wish i could have gone back and taken a few of the textures i painted in photoshop and brought them into substance painter so i could clean up some of those pesky seams. Ah well 🙂

 

Since my last post I’ve moved on from just performing small tests and just jumped right into making a full hand painted environment for the Blizzard student art contest. I definitely learned a lot; mostly that hand painting takes forever. Luckily it’s still fun. Once I submit my piece to the contest, ill post images of it in a separate post.

For now, I’d like to introduce the next step in my journey and start a mini blog series that will be about my research and tests on creating visual effects and particles for my Capstone scene, The Potion Master’s House (created by Chris Karbach, as I mentioned previously).

Here’s a list of the effects I’ll be creating based on what can be seen in the image:

• Water / Waterfalls
• Mist (from the falls)
• Potion liquid (movement and glows)

And here’s a list of the effects I’d like to make to enhance the scene:

• Potion “oil spill” effect
• Fireflies
• Skybox (not really an effect, but I want to work on getting a working ring of fluffy clouds)

This is what I mean by an “oil spill” effect. Sticking out of the side of the peninsula the house sits on is a sewer drain. As a fun addition to the scene id like to add some of the potion’s liquid to be spilling out and then having this effect in a bit of the surrounding water.

In the part of the scene that is behind the view point of the concept piece (where the viewer is standing) seems like a pretty dark area. To sort of liven up the space, i think it would be cool to add a few fireflies. However, perhaps it wont be as intense as seen in the above image.

Aside from these smaller elements, I think the water/waterfalls will definitely be the element that will pose as one of the bigger challenges I will face for this project. Id like to get my water to be able to react to its environment (collision and buoyancy) as well as have the waterfalls emit mist and fog. I would like to achieve all of this with the water and its aspects having a stylized feel so the water feels connected to the other elements in the concept.

Luckily for my Blizzard contest piece, I had an opportunity to create water for certain elements in my scene, and that has served as a solid starting place to making stylized water. It pales in comparison to the behemoth waterfalls I’m about to undertake, but still a good start.

 

I figured i’d jump back into painting in photoshop to give it another go. This time I wanted to explore photoshops 3D tools simply so I won’t have to jump back and forth too much between maya and my texture.

This time around I re-opened my previous rock file from painting round two, and added the painted uv layer to the rock mesh I opened in another psd file in 3D. I clicked on File > Open > Rock.obj (that I exported from maya) and it opens up in 3D in photoshop. If you double click on the diffuse layer that’s already created in the layers tab for the mesh, it will open up the UVs in another photoshop window and I just duplicated my UV layer directly into that file.

So luckily, now I have my 2d texture that I can continue to tweak with 3D painting benefits.

I mostly wanted to focus on getting better secondary and tertiary shapes out of this, so here goes.

I used this video to help me set it up so that I could paint on the uvs but see it updated as I go in 3D; https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/photoshop/using/3d-painting-photoshop.html

Anyway, I updated my texture, and the 3D tool in photoshop luckily saved me a little bit of time.

I like it a lot more now. Basically, the linework is more defined, the shapes make a bit more sense so its more cohesive now. The 3D worked well for this because my texture was updated in real time so I didn’t have to jump back and forth reloading textures in maya to see how it looks. There is still work to be done on colour tone and some of the line work to fully finalize it, but overall i’m happy with how it went.