4th Week Final Film Room Project

The final week for me was spent making sure everything was in engine properly and that our final scene matched the film shot as much as possible.

There’s a big shaft of light that cuts through the scene that shines through the multi coloured windows, I did consider the possibility of making that a decal on the floor seen as the brief for this project is not to make a playable level, it just needs to be an exact copy of the shot from the film and nothing else. But instead I did some research into the lighting in Unreal 4 and found that there was a way to shine light through a semi-transparent object and retain the objects colour information and project that onto other objects in the scene.

In Unreal 4 you can make a post processing volume to adjust the colours of an area. Our textures were slightly off from the colours of the actual film, so I created one of these volumes just to get it to match up with the film a bit better. Here’s a GIF that shows you the before and after adding the post processing volume:

I’m not 100% happy with how the project ended up, there are issues with the lack of grunge and wear and tear of the textures I produced, my textures were far too clean. Due to the way you get Unreal to cast coloured light meant that I could only apply an albedo to the texture of the glass to get the lighting results that I wanted. Looking back I could’ve added another plane slightly in front of the glass which doesn’t cast shadows and has a clear albedo but has a roughness and texture map on, so hopefully that would produce the light beams that I wanted and make the glass look more realistic by utilising other texture maps such as normal and roughness maps. There were quite a lot of reflections in the glass surfaces in the film still that we chose that we didn’t get to put into our scene. The casted red light on the floor isn’t quite vibrant enough, the red part of that casted light should be more over to the left, there isn’t that much yellow on that main beam of light in the reference image.  Also the resolution of the shadows on the floor and walls were at quite a low resolution and I couldn’t seem to fix that, so I’d like to find out why that was in future and prevent it from happening again. As a stretch goal it would’ve been nice to make it a sort of playable level that you could walk through, instead we just fulfilled the brief in just making that one shot look like our reference where if you move the camera you see that it isn’t a real room.

 

So to conclude I’d go back into the textures and grunge them up a bit to make the scene look more naturalistic, I’d find a way to apply different maps to textures that allow coloured light to shine through them (e.g. the windows), I’d like to have replicated the reflections on the glass that the film shot had and it would’ve been great to have made the level playable.

Here’s a Gif showing how the two match up:

And here's our final scene on it's own: