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11 | I Lied, This is the End

  • Writer: Izzy Foo
    Izzy Foo
  • May 8, 2024
  • 18 min read

9 days left.

 

I will probably now write this as day by day as time ticks down to keep myself on top of everything.


To recap, the to-do:


-Shop Environment

-Breaking texture uniformity

-Fix detail lighting

-Fix wood grain direction

-Adjust sequencer

-Second hero asset??

-Place modular pieces in UE for renders

 

:D

 

I went to the gym this morning so was up, awake, and ready to work by 8am after having had breakfast on a little bench outside my flat and achieving my step goal for the day on the treadmill.


First on my list was wood grain, so I opened painter and got to work. This was a very simple step but added a lot to my props and I’m grateful to William for pointing it out. By using tri-planer projection on my wood texture, I was able to simply make a duplicate and rotate the projection to the desired angle after masking off the area. As I stated, this was not super time consuming.





I re-imported my textures into UE, and while I was there, I decided to fix my sequencer. The choices I made here were more artistic, adjusting camera starting points, blending shots together, and cutting others. My cinematic was too long, so I had to cut out about 30s to meet the time brief but afterwards my shots were a lot more seamless and flowed overall much better. By default, UE animates keyframes with an ease in and out, so to change these to linear I had to go into the curve adjustments and mess with the angles. Ease in and out are key animation principles but in these shots, it adds a lot of unwanted slowness between camera cuts.

 

I was still struggling with my detail lighting, I ended up increasing the exposure slightly in the post processing volume to help bring out some of these details. I also decided I needed to add in a skybox or some kind of atmosphere because for the life of my I could not get enough light to illuminate the roof detailing without absolutely blowing out the camera. My first thought was to use an HDRI like marmoset does to add in realistic lighting (no I did not check if this was possible), so I went to polyhaven and had a look around. I found an HDRI from Limehouse, London. How crazy is that! I was so excited. It was then that I hit the roadblock, everyone explaining how to use HDRI’s in UE were referring to a small box that says ‘use HDRI’ that is not present on my version of UE. I am not yet knowledgeable enough to know how to get around this. In the end my solution was to add back in a sky atmosphere and move the sun as low as possible without it being black to create an almost-night vibe. This works quite nicely and is a huge help in separating my restaurant from The Void.




 

Nice, 3 things ticked off and it’s not even lunch time :D

 

It didn’t take long to add some rust detail to my cranes, I feel now well versed in substance painter and adding the effects that I want is not too difficult. It is a small thing, but it adds that much more realism to these guardians. They watch the restaurant in rain or shine, dedication past preservation of the self.



Next was the breaking up of textures. I had been staring at one of my peers’ buildings who had made this beautiful foliage that trailed up the side of their building and had been thinking, I want some of that. To YouTube!! At the beginning of this module, I had watched a 40-minute video on someone explaining their process of making a foliage atlas and become very intimidated at all these steps I did not yet understand. I had also been looking for an excuse to use sampler, perfect, sampler has a very handy picture to texture function.

 

I went outside where I had spied some ivy growing around the base of my building and took some pictures. I tried to get an even spread of types of ivy, some that grew near the base, thick and wide, some of the trails, and something wispy from the end. I also took some pictures of individual leaves that I could dot around to fill out areas.



In sampler there is an option to create an atlas, which does all the blending of the maps. From there I was able to fine-tune my opacity map and get all the areas the programming cannot. There is also an option to fine-tune the strength of the height/normal maps, which I adjusted accordingly to suit my tastes. Finally, I was left with albedo, roughness, normal, opacity, and height maps for all the leaves and vines. They were all individual though, and not placed together like I wanted. I considered trying to use designer to assemble them all, and then thought better of it and went straight to photoshop. Here I placed all the maps so they fit into a 2048x2048px square, and exported them 1 at a time. Textures, yay!!

 

Maya was next, I made a new project and added a plane. In hypershade I assembled my maps into a new blinn texture and was very confused to why the opacity was not working. Turns out there is a tiny box I checked on a whim because it sounded relevant that needed to be checked. It said use opacity as luminance or something along those lines.

Side tangent, I never knew the difference between luminance or radiance until today. While I was working, I was watching someone explaining graphics programming and colour theory on YouTube and they explained how Radiance is the pure light data, and Luminance is that same data but in terms of Can You Actually See It With Your Eyes. I thought it was very interesting.

 

Anyway, that worked and I now had an atlas!!! From there I multi-cut out the shapes very badly and extracted them. Don’t look at these for too long its very un-optimal just keep going, move past it and forget :))




Arranging these into more shapes was fun, I made a couple of base ones, varying the angle of the plane and pulling some more forwards and others backwards – effectively creating an illusion of depth and variation. The singular leaves I could place along randomly to break up uniformity in a plane and just as more variation. Once I had a few of these I tried some placements on a copy of my shop in Maya, this was actually very helpful once I imported them into UE. I got very excited during this part because Plants!!!!





Alongside the mass import to UE I also arranged all of my modular pieces for presentation in a new level, I find it pretty cool to see all the components laid out next to each other, knowing what they come together to create. All my pieces in this modular layout are wonky, as they were cloned from my copy of the restaurant in Maya which is surrounded by a lattice deformer, but I promise you when not surrounded by lattice deformers the measurements are standardised and they all snap together correctly.



Copying the placements in UE I was able to create a nice illusion of Ivy creeping up and across the building. This one thing made such a huge difference to my restaurant I was shocked. I was so happy I had been able to add this, when I initially designed my shop I had wanted to include foliage, but didn’t as I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it as we had been told that foliage isn’t really covered until second year environment. I have said this a lot, but I am genuinely so pleased with what that adds to the building.

 

This is where I am going to end todays work. I find it crazy that I allocated so much time to all these things, but I got through most of them in 1 12 hour stretch - I guess I am making that seating area after all. Goodnight!



 

8 Days Left

 

I am playing a show with the Wind Band tonight! Not as much work will get done today but what I can get done I think is some research into what I could create as an alternative hero asset, as I feel like neither my shop sign or cranes fit the brief of a ‘Hero Asset’.

 

Having thought for a while about what a hero asset for this should be, I decided on making a outdoor seating set for my second floor balcony area. I will make 2 chairs and a table, in the Victorian cast-iron style. For design reference I have looked at pieces and replicas of the Coalbrookdale-style garden furniture, with Coalbrookdale being one of the first places to utilise a coke-fired blast furnace. Blast furnaces have been in use since 1st century China before spreading to the west during the Middle Ages. In Europe, charcoal was used to power these furnaces until 1709, when Abraham Darby began using coke to heat them instead, massively expanding the possibility for iron production in the UK which ultimately resulted in the Industrial Revolution.

 

Coke, of course, being the product of coal heated in the absence of air - what were you thinking it was. The process of creating coke is named “pyrolysis”, or “thermal distillation”. This process usually takes 15-18 hours at temperatures of between 900 and 1100 degrees Celsius but can take up to 36 hours. I won’t go into full detail of coke production, but in short, the process is as follows:

 

The coal is transported from the mines to the oven facilities and crushed. To control the consistency and density, varying amounts of water and oil will be added. Coke ovens are lined up in railway-fashion and a “larry car” will remove the lid of each oven and “charge” the coal into the oven (paste go in baking tray). It then gets levelled, and a layer of wet clay seals the edges of the “charging port” (oven door) in another process called “luting”. Then comes the thermal distillation. Much like github, the next step is called “pushing”- where the coke is removed from the oven and then showered (much like some people in the warehouse need to do) before being broken up into pieces the correct size to be used in the blast furnaces.


The emissions produced in these ovens have been classified as a “Group A, known human carcinogen” being a mixture of substances not exclusive to coal tar, hydrocarbons, and metals. Recovered materials from this are used in manufacturing of things like plastics, dyes, roads, insulation, and waterproofing. A study by J P Constantino, C K Redmond, and A Bearden states that risk of respiratory cancer is “as high as 4.45 times that for non-oven workers”. A follow-up after emission control and exposure limits were implemented indicated that the rates of respiratory cancer are “declining”, implying that the regulation has been “beneficial”.

 

The main chemical reaction in a blast furnace is Fe2O3 + 3CO → 2Fe + 3CO2. There are other reactions in the furnace controlling the gas atmosphere, but the main reaction is iron oxide and carbon monoxide reacting, producing molten iron. This iron produced is “pig iron” with a high carbon content of 4-5%. Most is sent for further processing to have the carbon content reduced and produce steel; however, some is used to make cast iron. (I have a point we are almost there)

 

“The world’s first iron bridge was erected over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale in 1779”

 

The Iron Bridge was built in 1779 through commission of Abraham Darby III (yes there were 3 of them, the second expanded on his dad’s iron business) and was proposed in order to better public relations and express the “versatility of cast iron and the skills of Abraham Darby III and his Coalbrookdale company”. This bridge was the first bridge globally to make use of cast iron in its structure, and inspired writers, artists, and engineers who visited from all over.


It wasn’t until later in 1820 when the first cast iron furniture was crafted, a 3-legged table by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (he was Prussian! It still existed then!). It grew in popularity and Birmingham became known for its metal furniture thanks to Coalbrookdale. It grew in popularity until the Art Nouveau period, where “mass production was shunned”. Despite this, the revival of metal in the 20th century was pioneered by Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

 

I couldn’t find any images of the original table, but here is a chair he created around in 1825,




The Coalbrookdale foundry was at the front of this innovation in the 1840s, and their designs became “synonymous with Victorian garden design” to the point where “Queen Victoria herself was known to have several pieces”. Features on these designs appear to align with the design principles of the Art Nouveau period, flowing organic forms and floral or botanical designs, as time has progressed this collection has inspired many new designs that are still popular today, however aluminium has become much more popular in the production of these due to its ease of casting and resistance to corrosion.


 

While researching I came across this coalbrooksdale-inspired design for a floral chair which really cemented how I was going to create this. I also looked at the coalbrook furniture website who have design replicas for sale which are aluminium cast. My shop has a small plum blossom motif, and this is something I would like to play with during this design process. In particular, I have the ‘logo’ of sorts placed all over the restaurant branding, this I would like to carry forwards in the furniture designs. Now the whole day has passed and all I have done is yearn for the mines. Time to get ready for my show!

 

7 Days Left

 

Time to start designing!! I looked for artists who had done paintings of plum blossoms, as I wanted to see what parts they picked out and chose to focus on. Dong Shouping’s Harbinger of Spring gives a very nice reference to how the wood grows and how the blossoms are traditionally placed along it. It all appears to be quite straight lines, with circular knots on the branches matching circular flowers. For overall shape of the chairs/tables I looked at the aforementioned Coalbrooksdale furniture replicas and inspired designs.


 


I started with the side of the chair, as I felt like that would help to accurately shape the rest of the designs. Beginning with base silhouettes to follow from, I drew on top design silhouettes – pretending the black circles are flowers because I’m not drawing all of them just for design exploration. I wanted to try playing with positive and negative space in these designs while also trying varying points on the scale between traditional Chinese ink painting to Victorian influenced, trying to get to somewhere in the middle. Laurel Crown marks Victorian furniture identifiable by “graceful, sinewy lines, carefully carved details, and other romantic influences”, along with features such as barley twist legs, and low arms. The furniture followed fashion, many of these changes mirrored changes in fashion, such as the popularity of exceedingly large dresses the Victorian era is known for, and the structural changes often had reasoning of accommodating for said fashion.

 

My final design for the chair was a mix of 2 initial designs, and I think it will work quite nicely. The side profile of the table is very simple, but I feel like that will juxtapose nicely against the design-from-hell that is the top of the table. I struggled with the table top. It took Ages to draw, and the 2 designs I came up with I don’t even like particularly. Some of the design features I took forwards, such as the inner ring of buds and the 5-petal shape like the real-life blossom. The time I spent at the beginning of this trying to stylise these designs into re-usable motifs was invaluable in this process. Quite often I could just trace my earlier sketches and move them into place around the ring, adding occasional structural support rings where it looked like the metal would collapse or bend if pressure was placed upon it.



The intricacy of these table-tops is astounding, I am thoroughly shocked. I have looked at the pattern reference for a few of them on the Coalbrook website and my eyes don’t even compute what is happening there. I would not make it as a furniture designer. The back of the chair and seat didn’t take too long and did not go through multiple iterations. This is because I am tired. My only job for today was to design this set, so now that everything I wanted to design is designed I’m tempted to just stop for the day. It is 6pm so I have worked on this module for a healthy 9 hours today. Tomorrow is modelling!! I plan to make all this using the curves function, so if I can get that all done tomorrow that would be very good :)

 

Until I run out of motivation I might start working on my referencing.

 

(I finished writing up my references so far YIPPEE it is 7.30pm I am tired)

 

 

6 Days Left

 

Today I woke up naturally at 6.40 which is too early for a Saturday, so I went for a run. Then I went the wrong way immediately, so I did 6k instead of 5k. I felt like death after this, many much death. The rest of the day was dedicated to my table. Beloathed. Good god did this take forever (7 hours). The low poly took about 5 minutes to pull together, and the high poly took the rest of the day. That’s literally all I did today, make table high poly. Wake up and make high poly. Then when I finished the high poly I made the chair low poly before cooking dinner and watching the first ep of Hannibal s3 with my flatmate.

 

I used Bezier curves to trace over the designs, which I had textured quickly onto a live-surface plane. Bezier curves were good for this because I could control the curve nicely, while also being able to have points. The curves were then Sweep Meshed, using the rectangle option as the surface of a table has to be quite flat, and placed. As the table is circular, and the patterns repeat around the table, I could use a bit of maths to duplicate the curves around. For example, if a pattern repeats 4 times around the circle, 360/4=120, therefore each duplication needs to be rotated 120 degrees around the origin point (which was conveniently (0,0) because I made the table at (0,0).





Goodnight :)

 

5 Days Left.

 

With the table done, it was time to make the chair. This was much smoother. Most of the mistake making had been done yesterday so I knew what I was doing, and with a much simpler design. This time it was much quicker, and I had finished by lunchtime! Time for a short trip into substance painter.


I discovered some issues while baking, especially as I was trying to bake opacity. I had to change my chair low-poly so that all of the places that would have opacity would be baked onto planes instead of the 3D geometry that I had tried initially. This fixed some issues but not all of them, so I took the opacity mask into photoshop and manually coloured in some of the areas that weren’t baking the way I wanted them too. I figured this was a quicker solution than trying to fix it in painter.

 

Substance painter brings be joy as always. The iron texture I made for this project was my base, and then for the table/chair I added different levels of rust and wear. For the table specifically I focused on rust that has dripped down, and dirt in the crevices and for the chair I added more edge-wear and polish from friction. I am so genuinely pleased with these assets, and I am Shocked I managed to complete them in such a short span of time.

I find it really funny when I place them on their balcony in unreal, because in front is just more railing that is the same colour, and behind is Plant and it honestly just reads as Noise from a still image. It looks nice through the camera as perspective causes a parallax effect which separates everything into different distance planes as the camera passes. Since this is now finished, I’m subconsciously thinking about glass. My windows are blacked out as nothing is behind them, but I have an opportunity here to create some kind of glass tea-set or mass to place on the table. The chairs are skewed as if someone has just left, so I think it would be a nice touch to place something on the table.




Glass also gives me the opportunity to explore the Fresnel effect – which described the relationship between reflectivity and the angle at which a translucent surface is viewed. Generally, the rule is that the closer the angle of incidence is to the normal, the less reflective a surface will be. A common example of this is bodies of water. If you were standing ankle-deep in the ocean, the horizon would reflect the sky, but if you looked down you would be able to see your feet through the water (assuming its clean).  

 

Anyway, this is me done for the day. Tomorrow we begin again :)

 

4 Days left.

 

After another run this morning I sat down and was really not feeling the motivation. Mehhhhh. I want to make my tea set but that means another round of research, design, modelling, and texturing. Anyway I spent most of the morning hanging out with my flatmates, and then around midday I went down to the warehouse so I would be peer pressured into working.

 

Except, today is a bank holiday. The warehouse is not open. So me and my friends are standing there like, where do we go now. We try the 24hr suite, nope, every computer was full. What about the Games Academy? The doors are locked. What about the FTI spinny-door? Also locked :(

 

At this point we were like well shoot what now. It was a nice sunny day so I ended up just chilling outside on a bench by my flat, and I had my boxing gear so I did a bit of informal technique coaching for some of my friends who are interested (at the hobby level we were functioning there is no physical danger for them). It was a really nice day so I don’t regret spending it in the sun, but I now do feel guilty about having not done anything. Maybe after dinner I will attempt some (I am probably lying). We have planned to go to the warehouse tomorrow, hopefully for most of the day and I can get my tea-set done.

 

3 Days!!!!

 

Warehouse was open today :D


I still was feeling my abhorrent lack of motivation, but I pushed through and made that teapot. For reference I had looked at an early 18th Century teapot housed by the MET Museum, yet I had decided I wanted to do a bit more research before continuing.


Popularity of designs changes throughout time, and a Teapot from the early 18th Century may very well not have been in fashion during the Victorian Era. After a peruse through the gallery, I saw a few teapots designed in the correct period, and they were noticeably similar to each other as they were different to the initial teapot I looked at. The original teapot was from the Qing Dynasty in the Kangxi Period of 1662-1772 and made of painted porcelain, The museum classifies it as from Chinese culture. The new teapot, however, is from the late 19th century, made of silver and classified as Anglo-Chinese. Anglo-Chinese! That’s the same as my restaurant, and me.





I decided to re-make my teapot, now in a similar style to the Anglo-Chinese teapot. Its not particularly detailed, but its only purpose is to be a prop. When texturing, I tried to make it look as if the glass was fogging up above the tea but I don’t feel this worked particularly well. I did add a Fresnel effect to the glass, hooking it up to the emissive as I saw lecturers do, using 1.5 as the exponent. Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting, the emissive just made it glow bright red/green. Hooking it up to the refraction instead left me with a much more subtle effect. I placed the teapot, teacups, and saucers in their correct places on the table and quit for the rest of the day.




 

2 Days..

 

Mostly I just prepared for the hand-in, compiling renders and screenshots of UV’s. All of my props were finished, I was happy with my lighting, and my sequencer was set. After I took all of my screenshots, I exported my sequencer as an image sequence. This was so I could import it into Davinci Resolve, add some music, fade transitions, and a short title.

I wont lie I did google royalty-free Harry Potter inspired music and click on the first YouTube video I saw. I scrubbed through for a while until I landed on ‘Rolling Hills’ – Sir Cubworth. I used part of this track as background music for my cinematic.

 

This work referred to contains Music Track Sir Cubworth - Rolling Hills that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Author: Sir Cubworth

 

I’ve used Davinci Resolve on my own time, so it didn’t take too long at all to add and cut the audio, and the title. The only thing I came across was occasional glitching in the camera? I had assumed it was an issue linked to .mp4 exports as a previous export of my cinematic had the same issues but as it persisted through in the image sequence, I can only assume it is something to do with my UE5 cameras. Its not something that bothered me as much as it probably should, so I left it.


My file was zipped and submitted.



word count: 15,257

word count (references): 16,926


REFERENCES


CLEAN AIR COUNCIL. (2016). WHAT IS COKE. [online] Available at: https://pacokeovens.org/what-is-coke/ Clean Air Council


NATIONAL TOXICITY PROGRAM. (n.d.) Coke-Oven Emissions. [online] Available at: (https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/roc/content/profiles/cokeovenemissions.pdf National Toxicity Program


ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. (n.d.) Coke Oven Emissions. [online] Available at: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/coke-oven-emissions.pdf. Environmental Protection Agency

 

CHEMEUROPE. (n.d.) Blast Furnace. [online] Available at: https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Blast_furnace.html#_ref-0/ Chem Europe

 


THE IRONBRIDGE GORGE MUSEUM TRUST. (n.d.) The Iron Bridge. [online] Available at: https://www.ironbridge.org.uk/about-us/the-iron-bridge/#:~:text=The%20world%27s%20first%20iron%20bridge,Severn%20at%20Coalbrookdale%20in%201779. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust




SCHREIBER, Barbara A. (2024). blast furnace. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/technology/blast-furnace. Britannica


LAZY SUSAN. (n.d.) The history of metal garden furniture. [online] Available at: https://www.lazysusanfurniture.co.uk/blog/garden-furniture/the-history-of-metal-garden-furniture/. Lazy Susan.


VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM. (n.d.) Garden Chair, c. 1825. [online] Available at: https://collectiononline.design-museum.de/#/en/object/42104?_k=gmp553. Vitra Design Museum


KNOLL. (n.d.) Wassily Chair. [online] Available at: https://www.knoll.com/product/wassily-chair. Knoll


ROYAL SOCIETY OF CHEMISTRY. (n.d.) Aluminiuim. [online] Available at: https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/13/aluminium#:~:text=This%20is%20because%20of%20its,and%20the%20sixth%20most%20ductile. Royal Society of Chemistry.


Unknown Maker. (n.d.). Victorian Lily of the Valley Design Garden Chair – in Cast Aluminium. [cast aluminium] [online]. Available at: https://www.thevictorianemporium.com/store/product/victorian-lily-of-the-valley-design-chair The Victorian Emporium.


COALBROOK FURNITURE. (n.d.). Reproduction Victorian Garden Furniture. [online] Available at: https://coalbrookfurniture.co.uk. Coalbrook Furniture.


COALBROOK FURNITURE. (n.d.). Grape Carver Chair XL. [online] Available at: https://coalbrookfurniture.co.uk/product/grape-carver-chair-xl/ Coalbrook Furniture.


COALBROOK FURNITURE. (n.d.). Victorian Round Lounge Table Ø 120cm. [online] Available at: https://coalbrookfurniture.co.uk/product/victorian-round-lounge-table-o-120cm/. Coalbrook Furniture.


COALBROOK FURNITURE. (n.d.) Victorian Round Table Ø 94cm. [online] Available at: https://coalbrookfurniture.co.uk/product/victorian-round-table-o-94cm/. Coalbrook Furniture


SHOUPING, Dong. (1904-1997). Harbinger of Spring. [ink and colour on paper] [online] Available at: https://www.comuseum.com/product/dong-shouping-harbinger-of-spring/. China Online Museum.

 

 

THEMET. (n.d.) Teapot. [online] Available at: Te Chi | Teapot | Anglo-Chinese (Shanghai) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

CUBWORTH, Sir. (2020). Rolling Hills. [music] [online] Available at: https://directory.audio/free-music/cinematic/6662-sir-cubworth-rolling-hills. Directory Audio.


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