With the main platform textured and looking like the images in the last post, I set off to look at the upper parts of the scene.
Working with sculpts that would end up as Nanite meant I had the freedom to quickly make rich silhouettes. I didn’t get bogged down into sculpting any intricate surface detail though, as I still was going to leave that for the texturing.
On the top, ceiling of the scene, I blocked out different shapes. I wanted light and light flooding through the open ceiling to be my main “asset” there. As such light itself (and Lumen) dictated what I would do with the sculpts up there and their silhouettes.
I tried this fractal-like, flower opening, with the thoughts of rotating my Directional Light to give me staggering shapes inside the lower scene, through light and shadow.
For the time being I left the aggressive light casting through to only fall on the upper left parts of the pictures seen above. With that angle I also got the nice spots of light coming from the cracks. All of it was just through my Directional Light and no additional spotlights or light functions to fake anything.
Later, much later in the dev, once I started revisiting the lighting and the atmosphere of the space, as per ideas from Hayley and Oliver, the opening in the ceiling combined with Lumen allowed me for making even more exciting and interesting experiments. Those were ones where the shadow shapes cast on the floor are even more obvious. We will look at those later on in further posts.
Some more sculpts from the upper pieces:
Getting all of those pieces done, I got into digging out a spline Blueprint system I had made some years ago and repurposing it into the blockout of some roots and vines.
I needed something to populate the walls and give them more richness and after my friend Sophie Deschamps did a paint over, I commited to the idea of roots.
(Bas screenshot by me, paintover art on top by Sophie Deschamps)
The roots blocked out in the scene (I went for a bit more gentle and smaller look):
I wont go into much detail about the Blueprint and spline, but if you want to read into detail about it and find some useful links on the topic, make sure to check the third entry in my blog series about this project:
I can’t not mention an off-topic here: I saw some of the UE 5.3 “Draw Spline Tool” preview and might have to revisit trying that tool for the purpose above. It seems so fun! I wish I had it when I was blocking out the splines above.
My splines were done the ordinary way - by dragging verticies slowly and steadily one by one, haha.
After I blocked out my splines in UE I baked them into static geo, took them into Blender for a tid bit of quick polish: mainly to fix any knots and straighten UV maps.
I then took them back into engine and this is where I was visually:
Close up of how the details were coming along in the corners of the room:
Then came lots of tweaks, struggles and experimentation with color. I also replaced the Houdini orb in the middle for a Nanite mesh that is a rock orb with crystals. But that will be for the next post!
Cheers,
Pete.