[FILM] My progress thread for my as of yet unnamed short film(s)

They say that the great ideas are two or three old ideas which are connected in a new way. Like, observing the lid on a pan with boiling water jump up and down, and then working in a black smithy could have been combined into a steam engine driven smelting hammer.

I’m making a film with Unreal Engine 4, and my idea derives from three parts: I want to tell little stories, I was playing with Blender to learn how to model, and a friend of mine wanted to show me an epise of an old British show called ‘Spitting Image’. It exploded in my head: maybe I could, as a solitary figure in my room, make a ‘puppet show’ with Unreal Engine.

Lucky I have no idea how much is, most likely, behind that. In any case, I’ve started to construct the ‘set’. First I’ll do the landscape. Then I’ll build a town in that landscape. I’ll make a lake, a river, and then individual buildings. And then, when the set is finished, I can start to make the ‘puppets’.

You old hands who have been doing this a while can remove the hands clasped to your faces now. The greatest human achievements are those where the achievers started out with a simple ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to…’ without having a single blasted clue about what they were getting themselves into.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a little record of my progress in here. I’ve been doing this for two days, and it’s simple stuff. First I made this landscape in World Machine.

It’s an 8x8 km landscape, and I’m modelling it on Scotland. It’s granite rock, grass, water and trees. Scotland is a funny country. It’s like Norway, but with more rain. Except the building materials differ from Norway. Sometimes you wonder if whatever force shaped the land ran out of building materials and just substituted anything that was nearby. Like, it ran out of granite, and then decided to just mash together what granite there was with a heap of iron oxide to make red rock. Or they decided that it would be fun if gravity was suspended for a bit in order to create weird crag shapes.

Anyway, I’m going for a more traditional look. No red rocks. No funny crags. I don’t know how to make those in world machine. Yet. Besides, those are probably best modelled separately in Blender.

This is the landscape as seen from the ground. And the next one is the landscape with a basic material on it. You might call it the first coat of paint. And there’s a problem with this landscape - my first indication that I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

How do you have several materials in a landscape? Rock is hard, and reflective. Light bounces straight off rock. I doesn’t penetrate the surface. But with grass and dirt it does. Grass is quite transparent. Lots of light shoots right through it. Dirt is a bit like human skin. There’s quite a bit of subsurface scattering going on. But with just one material on the land, there’s one setting for basic grass and dirt and rock. It all has the same reflectiveness, the same opaqueness.

This is the schematic for my landscape material. It’s the one seen in lots of youtube videos that attempt to inform thick-skulls like me about landscape generation.

Next up is to create the grass for my landscape. I’ll have to model that for myself. I’m a bit worried about the trees though. The sapling add-on in Blender ate up nearly all my memory, and I have 16 GB. And the tree I was working on wasn’t even particularly advanced. I just want to make a birch tree. This is the image I am striving for. When I put my camera down in one spot somewhere, I want to see something like this. Beautiful.

While I wait for the kite demo to install (after having downloaded it since early this morning!) I have been doodling.

My aim is to make a simple cyperpunk gun. The materials will be brass and dark wood. I wanted to keep it simple, and put the detail in the texturing. This is a low poly version of the gun. Basically an hour’s worth of extruding and vertex manipulation.

But they say that one should start small, eh? Still waiting for Kite Demo to install. I’m hoping to see if I can learn anything from it for my film(s). There are two reasons why I wanted to use Unreal Engine: first because of the Kite Demo. Obviously you can make films with the engine. Second, because of the Witcher 3 launch trailer.

If you ask me, it is the best damned launch trailer in the history of gaming. It’s massively inspiring. After all, while there are amazing coders and tech heads in this community - I’ll never fit into that niche. But I could make trailers. I could make cinematics. I could make films.

Yeah, that’s my corner. I hope. Here’s the kite demo, in case you (and how could you in that case?) have missed it. And after that, there’s the two inspiring Witcher 3 launch trailers. The first “A Night to Remember” and the second, the opening cinematics of the game.

POSSIBLY NSFW:

My gun is finished. It’s a simple thing; almost not worth mentioning. But it was relaxing to make, so here it is.

I told someone of my project, to make a film with a game engine, and the response was an uncomprehending stare: “Wouldn’t it be better to use something like Blender or Maya for that?” Maybe. Would it? I don’t know, and I don’t know enough about Unreal Engine to determine that yet. I think I’ll get enough knowledge by trying to use it.

For all, using UE4 has a very practical aspect to it. I am making one film, but I have in mind to make several. If I build a “set” for my film, then I’ll be able to constantly reuse it easily. I’ll have a world to slowly inhabit over time, with the hard work already done.

Speaking of hard work, today has been about exploring (and learning about) the underlying systems within UE4. These two images show my progress. My world has come a bit from the moon landscape in my first post, hasn’t it?

I wish I could say I’d made the things you see, but I haven’t. The trees are wrong - I want Scots pine and birch trees in my world. I also want a different kind of grass. And the flowers are wrong too. The assets in this scene are all from the Kite Demo. Or not. I have downloaded the kite demo, and at this point it’s difficult to differentiate Kite Demo assets from assets normally included.

What do you think?

The problem with becoming heavily involved in a project is that you come to a point where you never stop thinking about the project. For instance, I have a habit of doodling in order to keep my art-levels up. It’s simple stuff - done mostly for mental relief. You grab a stylus, the wacom tablet, and off you go.

So, I was doing that, and just laying the foundation for a landscape scene when I made the connection that the branch-handling of Blender’s sapling tool is all wrong for Birches. Sapling branches always start perpendicular to a trunk, but birch branches start parallell to the trunk. Weight then bends the branches down. See the image of the birches above.

Sigh. I still have months to go before my film is finished. I’ll have to put up with everything being included in the project. Hah.

I haven’t died. Yet. But this heat may finish me off. But it gives me an excuse to stay inside where it’s cooler, and play with my computer instead of doing something useful. And I’m working on my film, and as I go I have side projects to learn aspects that I need to learn.

I bought a license for ZBrush R47 a couple of weeks ago. I forgot how much I fight with the UI of this program. It feels like I’m making no progress. When I have to look up how to zoom in on a model, it’s bad. Consider more important operations like creating a smooth metallic surface that either doesn’t look pock-marked, or like it’s been melted and then cooled back into a blob…

For the specific purpose of learning ZBrush, I made a side-project to build a robot. First I used my trusty old Krita and my Wacom to doodle out a basic, simple form.

Instead of fighting ZBrush I decided to make a ‘clean and simple’ scaffold model in Blender. I just filled out the basic form, lowpoly. My aim is to bring it into ZBrush and add detail and texture to it. That is, when I stop fighting the UI and become used to it. I have to say, I’m tempted to do it all in Blender. How come a software maker makes such a quirky non-standard UI?

Like with all kind of art, things changed from the drawn doodle to the actual model. Particularly the feet changed. Instead of big, huge, clunky feet, it suited the model better to have more ‘elegant’ and dainty feet. Anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to. Still learning.