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.

Alpha presentation feedback

After presenting my alpha build I have to say my confidence has been shaken a little bit. To start with feeling under the weather hampered my presentation so my usual rapier wit was not present, along with a little lack of preparation and trying to rush though to meet the 5 minute deadline. Some of the questions however caught me off guard and really made me consider if I was heading in the right direction with using Mental Ray. Yes it is the definition of the module, learning an advanced 3D method but if it looks terrible, is hard to do and takes ages to render then what really is the point? I wanted to be different as everyone was using UE4 to create their projects I wanted to do something completely different that would look better and after seeing everyone else's presentation and hearing the feedback I really am thinking about using UE4. I'm going to try out my scene in UE4 to see what it looks like but I have to make a decision fast as I am going to need to learn either UE4 animations or Mental Ray. Trying to learn both at the same time will be too much and both will look terrible. On the whole the presentation has not convinced people I'm on the right track but in fact has nearly convinced me that I might be going the wrong way about this whole project.

Small texture update

The textures for the Prometheus have been finished and I decided to put them into Marmoset to see what they look like. I'm very happy with how the textures have turned out considering that it is mostly hand painted in Photoshop. The shipyard and shuttle textures are also completed. I also added a glow map to the Prometheus's engines as the emissive map wasn't giving me the results I wanted to make the nacelles really pop when rendered. I am seriously considering re exporting the Substance Painter textures and Diffuse, gloss and specular as I have decided on rendering the scene in Maya. I just feel that I will get the best result using Maya and it will also give me a great opportunity to try out Mental Ray rendering as it uses advanced methods to get a decent looking render.