Gods of War: Sprint 6

 This sprint consisted of gathering all the clips together, lighting and rendering them, and stuffing them all together into one video. I wish I had more time to put this all together, but alas, some items were not delivered on time. What can you do? It's no matter, I was at least able to work around some things in the mean time.

Here are shots from the clips I'm preparing:

For this initial shot, I aimed to blend the lantern's light, to not appear so spotty, and to pull the attention to the tori gate. I lowered the intensity of the lanterns, and increased the values of the lights by the gate. Wherever I could, I also tried to pull a gradual fall off of light. I also added fog cards in the background to separate it more from the foreground.

With this shot, I changed the original angle of the key light. Putting it behind him allowed me to work with more contrast to really let the muscle structure show. I also added a small red glow to his eyes, to draw the viewers eyes. 

In this shot, I added some fake lighting to push out certain areas. There are lights with gold accessories to show off it's shine and I added a bit of colored lighting to pull out the blues of the Raijin's skin. I made sure to do it very delicately as too not look too obvious or unnatural, and ensure that her blues still registered in between orange and red lighting.

Gods of War: Sprint 5

 This sprint I needed to focus on lighting and set dressing. 

With a couple changes in our scope, it did give me a couple blockers that pushed me a bit behind schedule. I should be spending the rest of tonight and tomorrow morning getting in some final touches, now that everything for this week is in engine.

I swapped out all the rock and lantern white boxes for models from a Japanese asset pack, and tweaked a bit of the global illumination. 

A bit of the light mixer.

Gods of War: Sprint 4

 This sprint I was mostly focused on the level sequencer. I wanted to get the sequence as close to finished as I could, so for the rest of the project I can put most of my attention towards lighting.

I finally got independent lighting set ups through the use of sub-levels. The process is as follows:

With the Levels window open, open the drop down menu and click "Create Here"

After naming the sub level, right click on it, go to Change Streaming Method >> Always loaded

Then, within the shot you're lighting, click Add, then add a Level Visibility Track

Once added, right click on the track for level visibility and go to Properties >> Level Visibility >> Level Names. Click on the plus button to add an element, then type the exact level name of the lighting sub level.

In its current state, the lighting will still be visible in other shots. So we have to right click on the level within the levels menu again, and click on Change Streaming Method >> Blueprint. We're now essentially telling Unreal that this levels visibility is dependent on being triggered by a blueprint, or in this case, our level sequencer.

Now it's no longer visible from other shots! It's worth noting however, when reloading a project, all of the lighting will turn on at the same time, so you have to turn the visibility off. I saved a bit of time with this by creating a folder for all lighting set ups.

Next I added in camera movement and started testing render times. I started with the movie render queue settings that were used with Secret Level, and it took about an hour. Here are the results from that render:

It looks a bit silly from the "clown" lighting I added to double check that the lighting is only on in certain shots. Using ostentatious colors helped me know for sure that the lighting wasn't staying on.

Gods of War: Sprint 3

 This sprint I focused on whiteboxing the layout of our scene, placing the characters, and setting up PBL lighting. 

Starting with my references, you can see I took a LOT of inspiration from Assassin's Creed Shadows. These helped in getting a more visually appealing level and finding a time of day for this to take place in.

And here's the new layout:

This took a bit of iteration. I knew pretty early that I wanted to add some verticality to the scene, as it just makes it more interesting. But I had a bit of trouble trying to do that while keeping the gods relatively close to each other. I think this works though. I swapped Susanoo with the Oni, as I added in a pond in the bottom left of the image, and having the god associated with water made more sense than fire. It also gives him a bit more room to have the wave slash behind him stay visible. 

The spheres will be bushes and various plants, and the buildings will be smaller shrines that we should be able to use Allen's modular kit for. The box Susanoo is standing on will be a large rock.

Next are my shots with the new lighting:

I cycled through about 10 different HDRI's before I settled on this one. And with each one, I had to readjust the EV values, the directional light, and the HDRI's intensity. It was tough trying to find one that I liked, and I may even continue adding layouts for different times in another sublevel so I can compare and contrast more effectively. We'll see.

Gods of War: Sprint 2

 This week was full of researching on cinematography tips for UE5, learning about UE5's sequencer, and PBR lighting. I set up the level's lighting to a dawn/dusk configuration using PBR values and capped the post processing exposure values. Then I started to set up the sequencer, with sub sequences for each shot to hold the lighting. This should allow me to add new sub sequences if I ever want to try different lighting configurations without losing the original set up. 

I began setting up 3-point lighting in each shot, just to get a base started to figure out what I like and what I don't like. 

Gods of War: Sprint 1

 For this sprint I worked on setting up the initial lighting and main camera shots. After finding a good spot for our shine on Nick's heightmap and white boxing the area, I began lighting by removing any initial lights from the sample scene. I browsed Poly Haven for an HDRI and eventually settled on this one:

Next I added my directional light and sky atmosphere. I created a chrome material to help with aligning the directional light to the HDRI's sun. Then I added volumetric fog with the Exponential Height Fog. I turned on the Light Shaft Occlusion in the directional light to create some subtle god rays in the scene. 

Lighting shown here is the end result from this week. The following images were taken earlier before some adjustments were made.

With the scene lit, I began looking for interesting shots of the characters. This was actually super fun because I really like photography. I gathered a handful of shots that we'll either continue to use, refine, or cut in the following weeks. 

The god, Susanoo, will be controlling the element of water. I want his pose to exemplify the intensity of his power.

The god, Raijin, will be wielding lightning. I wanted to get a good shot of the VFX that will show off the complexity of lightning.  

She will eventually be floating in the air, with some clouds surrounding her body. I felt this angular shot would help in showing that off, along with the taiko drums behind her.

The god, Ori, is harnessing the element of fire. The main intention with this shot is to get a balanced and stable full body shot to go with his bulky square build.

This close-up is one of my favorites here.

For our dragon, I felt a centered composition exemplifies it's power and dominance in the scene as some kind of 'overseer'. Gotta check up on our lore real quick.

Yo this is another favorite from the set. If we can pull the dragons body around, this could turn into a really neat composition. I might even pull the perspective a bit more by decreasing the focal length to intensify the shot. 

Basic establishing shot. This may change more in the future.

Showing off the stairs that lead up to the courtyard. Might play around with the focal length some more and see if I can get either the gods or dragon into the shot.

Close up of the lion dog statues. I originally didn't intend on getting this shot, but I really liked how it looked so I added it in.

The lighting in these shots aren't final! In the following weeks, I'll be creating different level sequences for these shots so I can fine tune the lighting for each shot to however I see fit. Below you'll find my references. 

Bunker Asset Pack Relighting

 ArtStation Post

I had a lot of fun with this lighting set-up! I really wanted to play with saturated, contrasting colors, and the emotion that they can convey. I took a lot of reference from sci-fi and horror films. Here's my reference board: