SCAD x Harbor Picture | Collaboration Project | SANM 560 - Week 03

Intro

Based on the suggestion mentors gave us last week, we decided to focus mainly on the camera design this week. Besides the camera shot design, we reassigned the duty to each team member.

Right now, Jackson is on duty for modeling and pre-visualization. I am on duty for Lighting and Shading. And Coleman is on duty for Environment and the Skybox.

Camera Shot Design

In order to get the correct keyframing and timing of each shots, I take the instruction from from professor Bridget, and thank a real shot by using DSLR Camera, and here is a prototype of what type of shot we want to do for our visual.

Material

The material part is the most challenging part I have faced this week. Based on the result of the Material Quilt Test I did last week, it is clear that Unreal Engine has many restrictions on the lass material creation.

As you can see, when the light comes through, there are some pretty transmission color when light come through the glass of the bottle.

And we can also see the clear reflection on the bottle as well. And that is the part that really hard to recreate in the Unreal engine, since the original glass shader in the engine looks really fake.

I have tried many ways to solve that restriction, and the final solution comes with the Color Absorption function in Path Tracer.

In Unreal Engine, Materials with their Blend Mode set to Translucent and a non-unit Refraction parameter are rendered as solid glass. And we can control the color of the transmission through the glass using the Color Absorption function.

To do that, we must create an Absorption Medium material output node in the Material Graph. This feature is only available for the Path Tracer as it requires tracking the state of the ray color through multiple bounces.

The color of Transmittance is controlled by the amount of absorption that is happening inside the glass. The whole formula for the of the Transmission color is like this: Transmittance Color = Color^(100/Distance)

And the result, the smaller the Distance is, the darker the glass would be. Below is render test for the new shader:

How it looks if we make the bottom part of the bottle looks darker:

And here is the turntable video of the new material.

And here is the new Pre-visualization we have for the scene: