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.