It took a while to understand Unreal Engine in the beginning but due to the ability to focus on this one project for the entire quarter I feel proud of what I have been able to create. As a reminder, this project was done in order to provide an alternative to my thesis exhibition, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 quarantine. I wanted to create something that honored the space but also provided an opportunity to take some artistic liberties that would just not have been possible. That being said, the ability to create elements that are not physically possible was a fun experiment and I enjoyed adding them into this project.
The workflow for this project consisted of modeling the structure and some other elements in Blender 2.81. A handful of basic materials were created in Blender, but the more complicated ones were created using Materialize and Substance Painter. Additionally, a lot of the structural geometry had materials applied that I found in a free Twinmotion Materials pack from the EpicGames marketplace. All of this content was brought into Unreal Engine 4 using the Datasmith workflow. This worked relatively seamlessly and only caused some weird rotations for a few objects in the scene. After I was happy with the look of all the geometry I started to finalized materials and lighting. At first, I wanted to bake my lights to get the soft shadows and photorealism. However, as the project progressed I felt dynamic lights would be more appropriate for the interactive and dynamic elements I wanted to include.
In order to complete these elements I had to dive deeper into Blueprints and found that I was able to learn this workflow quickly due to my familiarity with patch programming in Max MSP and Spark AR Studio. The only thing I had to learn was the ridiculous amount of options for nodes in the editor. I maybe know 1% of what’s available. I’d like to continue to play around with Blueprints in the future and see what other interesting things I can create inside UE4. So far I was able to create a day/night cycle that creates global illumination in my scene with indirect lighting providing more realistic light bounces off all the surfaces inside the space. Additionally, I created some interactive elements that allow viewers to see the hologram that would have been activated by all five participants. Viewers can also see an “AR sculpture” that would not have been possible to include in my actual exhibition. This was one of the more challenging finishing touches I added to the piece due to it being a 10,000 component particle system.
I’m still trying to package the game for HTML5 and macOS but both have proven difficult so far. The game is packaged and ready for Windows (64-bit) and can be downloaded using this link. The password is merkabah. Screenshots can be found below:
It’s been extremely rewarding to see what I had envisioned for my show actually take form, albeit a digital form. That being said, with the skills I gained to complete this project, I hope to endeavor into more real-time rendering of spaces as well as some possible work in the architectural visualization field. I know that there is still a lot to learn to move from a beginner to more of an expert in this use of these tools. I do know that right now I’m not all that interested in game design but I do like the ability to visualize space with the options to swap elements.