King of the Dead

So for the past 2 weeks I've been working in a team of 4 to create a throne, character and background relating to a king of the dead.
We began with basing it around Aztec and Mexican day of the dead gods and theming the scene as a comedic game show. There was the idea of using a wheel of fortune to determine where a dead person would end up in hell and possibly to characters being hosts.

This  idea was soon changed as the group felt it was something that had already been very overdone. So our next idea was to have death being an office worker doing all the paperwork of those that have deceased. It changed things around slightly as it made death more of a lackey than an all powerful entity.

It was going to be a scene based in around the 1950-60s with a very cartoon based style. Yet once again the idea was changed as they believed death was not obvious enough and could be misleading. So the idea was changed to Death being a war general. This idea was to be more obvious as he was in control of hundreds of lives. So I was assigned to come up with some room designs.

I took inspiration from slightly more futuristic war like rooms. Some features like the Normandy ship table were also influential as well as the mass array of holographic screens from a variety of films such as Captain America and the Hunger Games. I had the idea of the war general almost playing with peoples lives like chess pieces. So once we had the basic whitebox and scene decided upon I went and remodeled and got it in engine.

I designed a variety of materials in order to try and work out what would work best. For the screen at this point I just assigned it an available UE4 material. So I continued some concepting for the room by trying to design the screens. 

So from the left most image being my initial concept to the right most being the final outcome, I'm quite please with how it turned out. I had quite a few issues with getting the texture to work as at first I had overlapping Uvs so I couldn't have the warning sign on top working correctly. So after re-doing the Uv map I was then able to add a panning mask over the top.

With some time to spare I was then able to assist other members of the team texture assets and create an extra asset and particle effect for the scene. We managed to get the scene done in time and I'm pleased with the final screenshot though I would personally like to adjust the lighting more in the scene. A lot of the scene cant be seen simply from the final screenshot but hopefully we will do a small fly through of the scene as there are an array of moving screens and flashing lights in the scene. Though slightly stressful project simply deciding on the theme we managed to get a lot done in just two weeks.

PBR!

First week back and I'm quickly flung into PBR (physical based materials). We were given a simple project to create a variety of different materials in Unreal Engine 4 and adding them to premade objects, this included materials from leather to gold. It was a great way to get accustomed to UE4 as I had only previously used a much older and almost impossible version to use.

Immediately my fears of being unable to use Cry Engine this year were quickly silenced as I found the interface much simpler and easier to use than it old counterpart. Furthermore, thank god for no longer needing packages!

Metallic is also a new feature which can be used in place of specularity. Using a mask to indicate where materials are metallic and not, the engine replicates a metallic look to your material in the areas you indicate. Also instead of a gloss map it now uses a roughness map which determines how rough and reflective a material is, with white being rough and black being smooth.

Another thing I love about the material editor is how much you can customize settings. The colours can be completely customized, and you can create flat colour diffuses in engine and that is just the start. One of the things that amazes me was that you could adjust the materials opacity and how light reacted with it and penetrated it, this helped me create a realistic Wax effect.

Overall I was pleased with my outcomes, yet there is so much more to learn and understand in UE4. I think I will try and learn more about adding motion and extra effects to my materials and learning about other basic options that can be used to enhance my materials.