Final cinematic

I added a few little effects to the cinematic to try and make it look a little better. After getting some feedback on the cinematic the main issue was the blurry name on the side of the shuttle, to fix this I decided to increase the light intensity and re render the shuttle shots, I then lightened the clip a little and sharpened the image to make the A.Lawson 3D easier to read. I did have to re do the motion blur as the new shot didn't have any but this was not a problem. I also decided to add a subtle film grain effect which really does improve the look of the show, even subtlety. I then decided to tweak the colour balance to give it a slightly blue tint which I thought looked quite nice. I am slightly disappointed in how the cinematic looks quite blurry, I can't tell if it is the depth of field blur or the rendering but it is slightly disappointing to see.
Speaking of the whole project I am pleased with how it has turned out. I think the switch from Maya rendering to UE4 was a good idea even though it brought along a whole new set of issues I never managed to solve in engine but did in post processing. If I were to re do this project I would take the week I wasted trying to animate an emissive map in UE4 and spend a lot longer on the high poly version of my ship by putting in much finer details like the panel gaps and hull lights so they wouldn't pixelate like they have done in the texture files. Aside from that I believe that my project has gone really quite well despite the hiccups from the animation of the ship and emissive maps and the lighting from the Maya project breaking the day I decided to change from Maya to UE4 but all of these had work arounds, mostly in After Effects, so in the long run they didn't prove too much of a problem and apart from them I never really encountered any real problems that couldn't be solved with either some experimentation or a tutorial and so the project ran smoothly and it was finished on time and to a standard I'm very happy with.

Final cinematic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbvcnmHcqgo

The latest show reel

After lots of hours banging my head against various walls trying to get what I wanted I have finally succeeded. I first made a warp flash effect in After Effects which turned out quite nicely however as the lens flare effect I used as a base take sup the whole scene shrinking it down gives hard edges from where the scene border was. I'm going to try to find some way to blend the edges so it looks less silly. After that I tried to get my engines to glow. I decided to have them pre glowing for my scene and my aim in After Effects was to make them just glow more before it warped away.  I managed to do this and it was very effective so I decided to try and go one better and get it to power up from the start. This was less effective as I started with the engines black so in order to get the glow effect to work I had to work with the Alpha channel, which turned all the scenes completely blue apart from the bit which were cut out using the Roto brush tool so I decided to abandon that. While trying to come up with other ways to get around this problem Jason mentioned that I should render out a scene with black engines, one with glowing engines then blend the two together in Sony Vegas. Once the timing was solved this proved to work perfectly and I managed to use this method to power up the engines from black to blue, get the impulse engines to start glowing and have the warp engines glow intensely before warping away. For me this is perfect as it is exactly what I was trying to do in UE4 but failed but now I have finally managed to salvage about 90% of the final idea and that has made me very happy. I'm going to re do the warp flash effect and try to soften the edges as well as try to make it look more cinematic using filters but only if I can find tutorials with results I like the look of but on the whole I would say I am very nearly finished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LwX2ihGO7A&feature=youtu.be

UE4 show reel

I finished rendering out my matinee sequence and it has turned out quite well considering I haven't taken it into After Effects yet to add the warp flash and trying to make the nacelles glow that way instead. I decided to create several very low poly ships and a star base to go in the background as I felt that since this was a ship yard chances are that my ship wouldn't be the only on there so I put 2 ships in the surrounding docks and one orbiting the planet which you can see slowly come into shot at the start. I think this makes the whole scene look more populated and more realistic as I thought there was something lacking when I first saw the fly through which  I couldn't quite put my finger on but I think I fixed that issue.

I am a little disappointed in the weird blurred texture when you first see the Prometheus and I am unsure why that happens but it fixes itself in the next shot so if I can't fix it I won't stress too much about it. On the whole though I'm quite pleased considering half the things I wanted to do wouldn't work. Hopefully After Effects will be kinder and allow me to create the warp glow as well as the flash at the end. If I can't do that then this will prove to be a very disappointing project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCQmsOXhxTI

Big disappointments

This project is proving to be a huge disappointment. After about a week trying to figure out the animating emissive problem I have decided not to sink any more time into it and have given up. This is a huge disappointment to me as it really would have been something impressive that nobody else  has even thought to attempt. I do feel that I bit off more than I could chew with this but because I started in Maya the emissive map and the warp stretch were easy to create, leading me into a false sense of security as I just assumed that UE4 would be similar but I was very wrong. Not having the emissive glow is a big blow to the quality of my work and I am very angry and disappointed that I spent a whole week trying to figure out how to use the blueprints, material nodes and matinee to get the map to start glowing when I needed it to and the closest I got was making a slider for a material instance that changed the glow intensity to pre defined limits. Overall I'm starting to regret moving into UE4 for animating however if I hadn't I would be struggling with Mental Ray, render times and trying to use shaders to make 'poor mans PBR' as I can't remember the actual name for the nodes. I think this project might have been a bit to ambitious for my current knowledge level and a bit of a waste as I have not really learnt anything new, other than how not to do things. It wouldn't be as bad if things had eventually worked after my tinkering but they didn't and therefore I never learnt how to use things correctly, which in my opinion is wasted time as I have gotten nothing out of it.

Rock and a hard place

I'm beginning to question using UE4 for rendering seemed like a good idea at the time however now that I'm having to animate in it I am finding that UE4 has some of the most convoluted ways of animating I have ever seen. I managed to get my ship to stretch slightly before warping off however this was in a tester map and required the use of blend shapes, blueprints and a lot of problem solving. However when I tried to add it to my actual scene it failed miserably and I couldn't figure out how to get it working. In the end I decided to drop it and use a bit of animation to work around it. Animating the emissive texture has been beyond a nightmare and so far no tutorials I have found or have been presented with have worked neither has my messing around with material and blueprint nodes and the whole thing has been incredibly stressful and draining but it is pretty much required for my show reel. Another thing that is required is the blast of air from the umbilical cord however I have no experience with UE4 particles so I have asked for help on the UE4 Answer Hub so hopefully someone will give me some useful advice on how to achieve the results I want. I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew with this project but it's called Advanced 3D for a reason, and boy am I learning some advanced 3D methods.

UE4 problems

Now that I am using UE4 to render out my scene I have come across some new problems I wasn't even aware off. To start with learning the Matinee and keying animations is quite confusing. It seems to have the same rough workings as Mayas track editor but it is slightly less intuitive as the camera seems to anticipate what you want it to do and how fast it should move. Whereas in Maya the distance between and number of key frames dictates how fast and the movement of the camera UE4 does not. For example I was trying to get the camera to sweep down and focus on the name of the ship for a few seconds however the UE4 camera decided it wanted to slow to a crawl for a second before going back to the usual fast pace. So far I have yet to find a work around to it.
Another problem was that unlike Maya, UE4 has no way to easily animate the emissive maps which is crucial to my scene as it would look very strange with the ship already powered while in space dock. I did managed to find a UE4 tutorial however which detailed how to make a model switch between 2 textures however when I tried to apply it to the Prometheus it didn't work. I have asked on the Answer Hub and am waiting for a response.
The final issue I am having is with the ship stretching before it shoots off to warp however this might be solved as I have been informed I need to use morph targets in order to get it to animate and hopefully that will give me the results I really do need.

180 turn on rendering

After some decision making and 2 Mental Ray crashes I have reluctantly decided to abandoned it and go to UE4 instead. This decision comes from both my Alpha presentation receiving what I perceived as a less than warm reception to my idea of using Mental Ray and the longer I tried to defend my position the more I realised the I should probably stop defending my position and start rendering something before I run up against the deadline and this was before my lighting broke and Mental Ray decided to stop rendering anything and instead come up with errors so I gave in and decided to use UE4. This is an interesting choice, or so I have been told, to make so late in the module however I disagree as all the textures are sorted out, everything is in the scene, lighting is sorted out and the only thing it needs are the actual animations but since I have the shots worked out in Maya that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The only thing I think I will have issues with are the docking clamps and umbilical cord that will need deforming, the particle effect for the atmosphere escaping from the umbilical cord and the warp engines powering up as the camera passes by. These are going to need some quick research however I am very confident I can get this project finished despite the complete turn around in the rendering department.