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:

Progress on WoW Inspired VFX

 Over the winter break, I've been making progress on a World of Warcraft inspired VFX. I took inspiration from their priest class and have been making an AOE healing spell. 

pls ignore the low video quality :P

I'm gonna break down some chunks of the effect.

For the AOE fx, it's composed of a couple mesh renders, beams, and sprites. I created a disc mesh in Houdini and edited the vertex colors to create a gradient from 0 to 1 to 0 from the edge to the center. For the material, I essentially lerped two noise textures on top of each other for the Emissive color, and created an erosion mask using a Voronoi texture that's controlled using dynamic parameters.

On the edges, I used beams and got them in place using a shape location module with the ring as the shape primitive. They use a similar material to one I'll discuss in the next part of the effect. Lastly, I have two sprite emitters - one for a burst as the AOE spawns, and another of some random hanging particulates.

For the effect that occurs on a player within the AOE, I'm using three beam emitters and one sprite emitter. I made a material for the beams that has two different trails and gave them a bit of distortion and WPO. I made another version of that with a rainbow as a sort of light halo effect, WoW's priest class has very subtle rainbows in their VFX so I wanted to emulate that.

The sprites just briefly float up from where they spawn, but as of now they're not timed and I'll need to work on it further.

There's still two more parts to work on with this effect, both being tied to the player that casts the spell. Once I get a good grasp at all 4 parts, I'll begin fine tuning the effect's look and timing. Working on this was a bit frustrating but rewarding at the same time! It helped me understand UV's more and I have a better foundation for all of the nodes and modules I have available to me in both materials and niagara fx. I also got to work a bit with blueprints too, which was a huge help. Excited to continue working on this!

Portfolio Submission Powerpoint

    This was one of the projects I submitted for my FIEA application! It took about a week to get through, and I had some tough issues along the way, but eventually I found something for the look I wanted to achieve! I go more into detail within the power point below.