Credit:
Character and Church interior from Stefani, Church exterior from Lutong,
all of us contributed to sound

Project Description

In the CMU course 53884 ADVANCED PIPELINE TOPICS FOR FILM AND GAME ART, our group project involves creating a fully art-based cinematic piece using Unreal Engine 5. The narrative revolves around a city post-war in the medieval era, showcasing a vast cityscape, a grand church, and two crucial characters. Each group member contributed to different aspects, with my focus mainly on crafting the detailed city environment. This portfolio predominantly highlights the intricate work put into designing the city setting.

Role

Modeling - Texturing - LookDev - Environment Composition - Lighting - Volumnmetric Effects Simulation (Water, Flag) - Image Sequences

Blender - Unreal Engine 5 - Substance Designer - Substance Painter - Houdini

Team

Lawrence Luo Lutong He Stefani Wang

Look Development and Tech Art Reel for this project.

Including:

0:00-0:31 Environment Layer,

0:32-1:03 Blender Geometry Node Procedual Brush,

1:04-1:51 Houdini To UE5 Stacking and Piling Tool,

1:51-2:05 Substance Painter Usage

1 - Props & Architecture Set

2 - Architecture & City Structure Research & Model & Map

Research was the cornerstone of the project, drawing inspiration from the picturesque city of Prague in the Czech Republic. The striking contrast of the red roof against the light beige stone brick wall became a focal point in the design process.

Blender Viewport without Material

Here’s a geometry node that could help me generate the models I feed in a random position and rotation set. and I could weight paint the terrain to procedurally spawn houses on the face I want. The video showcase how I arrange the node and prameters I add to it for randomness. I also use Altermesh to transfer this node to Unreal Engine 5.

Blender Geometry Node (Procedural Houses) + AlterMesh >> Unreal Engine

I crafted a diverse range of medium poly medieval-style houses in Blender getting inspiration from various online references. These houses have features like wood structures, roof brick patterns, and placed exterior furniture, ensuring a rich variety of styles to populate a cityscape.

Blender Viewport Greybox

[Skybox from PolyHaven] Blender Viewport Rendered

3 - Stacking Meshes Tool: Houdini to UE5

I made a tool in Houdini for stacking and piling meshes up. There are many adjustable options and basically we can set those changeble value ourselves based what nodes we built between the input and output in houdini, and organize them when we build and export the tool. It lets meshes drop with gravity and stay inside a boundary. Houdini completely transfer those value we set for adjustment directly to Unreal Engine with a better interface for us to feed meshes, transform meshes, adjust the amount of meshes, set the collision boundary, set the boundary size, and finally the frame we want it to stop and generate as a static mesh in the whole animation. The type properties are the setups. 

4 - Lighting & Movie Sequences For Town

Utilizing the niagara system, the overall volume of fog vague the middle, which is the deepest part of the composition. This helps making contrast between the close part and far part. It creates a vibe that the character is working into the chaos.

Highlights here are rim light for the character, which enhance the metal detail of the armor, and several lights for grass and stone that lights up several parts, that brings some contrast at the front. Overall sunlights is from the front of the path, which emphasize the seam of the rock path, and create a soft shadow of the character walking toward.

As the camera move closer to the church, it conquers more percentage of the composition. The highlight of this angle is that the camera move under the connecter, and the church get larger, along with a difference of lighting. There are several fire particles vfx for enriching the elements in town.  

Placing the sun at the middle point of this sepecific composition make the sky gradient looks more realistic, and make a noir feeling with the sillouettes of the church on the top of the mountain. Slightly showing the top of the skyline of the town, and constantly moving camera forward, emphasize the importance of the church.