Freelance Year Week 1 Experimentation

Hi there, this my first blog post detailing my freelance year. This year I am mainly focusing on 3d modelling but I will also be experimenting and practising with other sectors of game design.

To begin with at the beginning of August I was made aware of the RTX summer showcase a social media competition ran by Nvidia, the challenge was for students to create a 30 second long render showcasing your VFX skills in Unreal Engine 5 and the theme of this video was to 'capture the essence of summer and the summer holidays.' The actual content of the video was up to the student.

With this in mind I began to form ideas on what my render could be my initial idea was to create a beach scene with fire works in the distance however I decided to look for references in the photos my Dad took while on a Mediterranean cruise and I found a large amount of pictures of cruise ships sailing across the horizon and pictures for the sunset on the ocean. After seeing these images I decided to create a scene of a cruise ship sailing in front of the sunset.

To start I created the model for a small cruise ship, to help with this I watched a few videos of how other people created ship in Maya so that I could create an effective model. I did have trouble creating parts like the bridge and the smoke stack as there was some N-gons and bad geometry however I was able to fix these issues. I then imported the model it 3D Substance Painter and gave the Ship a basic blue and white colour scheme that most ships have using polished metal materials.

After finishing the texturing I finally brought the model into a blank UE5 map where I used a sculpting tool to create some mountains and I installed the landmass and water plugins to create the ocean. I placed the model onto the ocean and used an sequence to animate the boat sailing across the screen for 30 seconds, after this I moved the sun to be above the mountains and altered the settings to make it look like a sunset.

I did have some trouble with the Niagara system as I have never used it before so I watched a few tutorials on how to create smoke. On the first few attempts the smoke didn't go high enough and wasn't thick enough so I watched a few more tutorials and experiment with the life time of the particles which eventually created the effect I needed.

Lastly as said on the competition website to get extra credit I enabled Ray tracing.

After uploading the to twitter I continued onto practising my 3D Art, I sometimes like going back to the basics to practise and see if i can new ways of doing things so, I watched a video series about creating a Rocket Ship while creating my ship I got to practise with the soft selections tool and the duplicate special tool on the bolts. I also think that this model helped me get better at creating UVs and colour coding the mesh to help with texturing in substance painter. Initially I was trying to create a cartoon rocket but after experimenting with the rust and scrap materials I decided to created a post apocalyptic rocket, taking inspiration from Fallout New Vegas.

Next I wanted to experiment with Substance Painter by trying to create to different scenarios using the same model. To achieve this I created a simple wooden box model with individual planks and skirting for some more detail. I took the models into Substance painter and I first created the Rotten Box. I used the wooden bark material to create an uneven surface and also used the plank material on the skirts to given the model variety of colour. I then used rock materials, cork material and rough wood combined with dirt cavity smart masks to make the wood look decayed or damaged. I then made another project and used only the smooth plank materials to given the box a pristine look. I only used the rust material with a smart masks to add some roughness.

Lastly I have begun to create a space station model put everything I've practised to the test on a large model with lots of detail. I initially created the model using concept images of future ships from google. The main things I took from these images was that space stations have very slender bodies while the outside rings are normally rectangular. I started creating this model using a cylinder as way to keep the different parts on the body in line. I duplicated the top part of the body with the corridors flipped it and placed it on the bottom of the model to keep everything to the same scale. I also created some scaffolding for the bottom and added a command centre to the top of the model with a communications antenna. After uploading the images of the WIP to the discord I received a lot of positive feedback as well as lots of suggestions for where to take inspiration from, I also got lots of feedback from Daryl to think about the functions of the station as well as to think about how to show the scale. The next day I created the outer top ring using a cube that I extruded into to create windows and then I used the duplicate special tool to create a ring and bridge tool to connect them. Lastly I created the oxygen tanks on top of the rings after finding a model on artstation that I took inspiration off.

Next week I hope to further the construction of my space station and hopefully start texturing to completion so that I can start into the level design jam.