Tea Shop

This is an environment art piece I made primarily inside of Photoshop, 3DS Max, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Designer, Unreal Engine 4, and DaVinci Resolve over the past few months.

I used this project to apply a lot of the information I'd been learning over the last few months involving both environment art in UE4 specifically, as well as architecture, lighting, and cinematography . Unfortunately (or fortunately), just to broach those topics took over a month of preparation modeling and texturing to get to a place where these lessons were relevant, but once I got there I was happy that I'd remembered what I'd learned and even happier that I'd taken notes on the things I'd forgot. It's a lot of fun to find organic and uncontrived shots in a fully dressed set, but the process of getting to that stage can be a bit protracted.

One immensely helpful lesson in particular was using an organized light rig with master, key, and shot components. While the benefits of this system of organization are self-evident for use in Sequencer (and any other cinematographic work), they're also very useful when determining light mobility and making light baking considerations.

I learned a variety of things working through the project, but with Sequencer in particular I found it fairly easy to recreate something of a 3DS Max Physical Camera object inside Unreal Engine using a Cine Camera actor with a hidden look at target. This, along with camera rig rails really helped with divorcing shot timing and camera position hangups allowing for some of the sweeping shots found later in the video.

On a side note, while not an actual debug viewmode, I found it handy to create a level sequence with an out of focus spawned camera actor to pilot around the scene in order to spot translucent textures in which I'd not yet disabled 'Render After DoF'.

I had a lot of fun discovering that the Substance Painter to Unreal Engine Live Link can be used for many more purposes than the feature initially suggests. The base color texture, three channels of masks, and normal map that are generated through the Live Link feature can be used to do a variety of 'live' things such as create decals, light functions, and even sprites for Niagara effects.

In the final render of both the video and stills I cranked up the console variables: r.ssr.quality, r.ssr.experimental denoiser, r.DepthOfFieldQuality, r.MotionBlurQuality, r.MSAA.CompositingSampleCount, and r.PostProcessAAQuality.

In no particular order, some of those vital resources I mentioned are:

CG Cinematography (https://chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematography)
Unreal 4 Lighting Academy (https://www.youtube.com/user/51Daedalus/)
Polygon Academy (https://www.youtube.com/PolygonAcademy/)