Final cinematic and conclusions

Here is a video of the final cinematic for my scene and a few screenshots:

Higher quality video can be found at the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5CRhnvMHmY&feature=youtu.be

Overall I feel the project went very well. I have learnt a lot of new techniques, experimented with a number of different approaches and created a piece of art that I am happy with. If I were to return to this project at a later date there would be a number of things I would work on. First, I would like to do a highly detailed sculpt of the lion fountain with life-like lions and a second tier. This would make the piece into a highly detailed beauty piece. I would also like to maybe work on more interior rooms as I feel this is my stronger area and where I enjoyed working most.

Better water

I wanted to go back and improve on my water jets and fountain as the materials and way I had done them were not how I would like. For pointers of where to start I went and looked at the Unreal 4 example map on effects. This gave me a good idea on how to use GPU particles for my fountain and water jets.

Old Jet

New Jet

This new jet has a lot more effects on it that make it appear more water like. I took the material for the water particles in the example map and edited it slightly for starters to make the water look how I wanted. I then began working on how the water fell out of he lions move. Initially it was just falling straight down which did not look realistic. I added a constant initial velocity of -50 to it to make it begin to curve outwards.

The next issue was the particle going through the floor on the level. To counteract this I added a collision module. This had the added effect that I could create a subtle water splash effect without the need for another em-miter. I set the collision to bounce and increased the friction. This created a little pool of bouncing particles at the base of the jet which acts like a water splash.

Feedback and improvements to include

One of the main pieces of feedback from the final presentation was to work on the flooring in both the bedroom and courtyard areas. I bgean with the bedroom. I thought about what a high status room may have on the floor and thought of parquet flooring as this is quite expensive. I used references such as seen below.

Hartswood Flooring. (2011). SOLID WALNUT AND WENGE FLOORING BLOCKS. Available: http://www.hartswoodflooring.co.uk/parquet-flooring/walnut-wenge.htm. Last accessed 10/12/2014.

The final result looked like this. I used a dark flooring to match the furniture and style of the room and added a gold trim to show the royal aspect:

After the bedroom I then moved onto the courtyard floor. I tried to add tiles like seen at the bottom of  the image below however I found the floor was then too busy and distracting so I changed it back to my original tiles and broke them up by adding a smaller tile in between each. This added some more variation, more colour and made the floor more interesting.

Guido Montanes Castillo. (2012). Court of the Lions. Available: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/court-of-the-lions-guido-montanes-castillo.html. Last accessed 10/12/2014.

Back to the Bedroom

After getting the courtyard to a stage where I was happy with it I returned to the bedroom. I had worked on this area much more for alpha stage so there was less to do here. I began by re-modelling a chandelier as I did not like the design of the original. I went with a design similar to that below:

Admin of site. (2013). Quoizel's La Parra Collection | Wayfair.Available: http://chandeliersten.com/la-parra-chandelier/. Last accessed 05/12/2014.

I created the mesh, added some basic materials then went about creating candle flames to add some more dynamics to the level. I used the following tutorial as a base for my knowledge. I knew the majority already but wanted to make sure I was getting the best effect I could using that method.

MetalGameStudios. (2014). Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial: Candle Fire Particle (english). Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzg5g9ikds. Last accessed 6/12/2014.

Particles and dynamic effects

In order to make my scene appear more lifelike and interesting I wanted to add some dynamic effects. I started by looking into particle systems for my fountain. The first stage was to try and create a material for the particle. I added a material of a round water drop. This did not look very good when one particle was being emitted but the more particles there were there the more effective it looked.

To create the fountain style motion I began by messing with the initial velocity of the particle. I wanted it to be moving in an upward direction mainly and then falling back down in various directions. To achieve this I put a large velocity in the Z-axis and smaller ones in the X and Y. This meant the particles went upwards mainly and then out in all directions after a while.

To get the particles to fall back to the ground I added a constant acceleration module with a value of -250 in the Z-axis, this pulled the particles back down to the ground.

The next thing to solve was that the particles would come back down after being emitted from the fountain and then simply fall through the ground forever. To solve this I added a kill module in Cascade and set it to "floor". This meant that when the particle reached that low boundary it would be killed. This also meant that the particle system would continue to run as it never reached the maximum number of particles, whereas previously it would only run for a number of seconds.

I then wanted to add water falling out of some of the lions mouths. I initially tried to do this with particles but I was struggling to get the movement I wanted. My next approach was to build a simple cylinder mesh in the shape that I wanted the water to move in and add my water shader from earlier.

This gave the cylinders a water like look to them however the water was not moving correctly. To alter this I sped up the panners in the shader so it looked like the water was being propelled out the lions mouth. This made the effect look better. I am still not entirely happy with the effect but for times sake I must move on and return at a later date if possible.

After the fountain was looking okay I moved on to add some quick movement to my bushes, bed curtains and banners. I began with the bushes by adding the following nodes in the material:

This set up gave a slight ripple to the leaves which worked well. I did not want to have too much movement or it would look unnatural.

For my net curtains I used a sine node and a panner in the material editor, plugged into the world position offset. This gave a simple ripple movement which looks like a light breeze is affecting the fabric. I set the panner to the same kind of value as the bush movement to make sure the wind speed is consistent throughout the level.

Ivy and Banners

After adding some dynamic effects to my scene, I felt the courtyard was looking empty so I began to think of more of a back story to the area to help me with ideas for what props to add. I came up with the idea that the palace was being prepared for the royal return. The family has been away, perhaps on holiday or to visit family and is now returning. They would obviously expect the palace to be in top condition and clean. This explains the trimmed bushes and tidy bedroom. The outer courtyard stone will be worn down as it is not a newly erected palace however it will not be so old that the pillars are falling apart or cracks everywhere. With this story in mind I began to think of what would be arranged for the family's arrival and thought about having banners with the family crest on. I went and did some research to find out the name of the family who used to live at the Alhambra and discovered the name "Mohammed I ibn Nasr". This was a prominent family in the Masrid dynasty and the coat of arms for this was as follows:

Heralder. (2013). Coat of Arms of the Emirate of Granada (1013-1492). Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasrid_dynasty#mediaviewer/File:Coat_of_Arms_of_the_Emirate_of_Granada_(1013-1492).svg. Last accessed 28/11/2014.

The next task was to add this symbol to some banners and dress the courtyard area.

I chose the colours for the banners based on the family's colours and the bedroom colours I had chosen earlier in the project. I wanted to tie in the two rooms so they felt like part of the same building even though one was exterior and one was interior. It was a nice coincidence that the red colour of the family crest was near the same colour of the furniture I had used inside so it did not require much tweaking.

For extra detail I added some ivy running down off some of the roof section. I used an ivy generator to get a basic ivy mesh. 

I found this was very useful as it helped vastly with the time element. If I had created my own ivy leaf (sculpted in ZBrush, baked and then placed hundreds over some branches) it would have taken twice as long if not longer. It took a bit of time to understand the ivy generator and to get some pieces that I was happy with me but it was still quicker than any other attempts I had made. I added my own textures and materials to the leaves and branches then placed a number of clumps around the scene to add more colour variation to the scene.

Thomas Luft. (2008). An Ivy Generator. Available: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. Last accessed 30/11/2014.

Water Shader

To add some dynamic elements to my scene I worked on creating a simple water shader for the fountain. I used the following tutorial for the base shader then tweaked values and settings to my won design.

Pub Games. (2014). UE4 - Interior Water #1. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPmRV1Z9ikY. Last accessed 27/11/2014.

One of the first issues I faced was making sure that the water was moving in the right direction. Using the values from the tutorial made my water move incorrectly and stretched it. To counteract this I simply has to change the RGB values on the panner to correspond to the correct axis.

Incorrect panning

The next issue was making the water the colour I wanted it to be. The tutorial gives a completely see through, almost black water colour and I wanted a much nicer clear blue colour. To change this I added an albedo map in the base colour section instead of using an RGB value. By doing this I got a more natural colour but I also had to make sure that the texture map was using a panner as well so it blended into the motion of the water.

When playing around with the panners I realised that the water was moving too fast for the wind speed in the environment so I lowered the panner constant values to decrease this. I also noticed that the water was too transparent so I played with the depth fade value so that the water was not disappearing too soon for the player to even see it.

Final Shader:

UPDATE: I used rotators instead of panners for the final water shader as it gave a more realistic feel to the water movement.