SCAD x Harbor Picture | Collaboration Project | SANM 560 - Week 06

This is week 6 of our Production, and we have received many good instructions from this week's presentation. There are four key points from this week:

1. Banish or Reboot Shot 3

2. Add depth to the mountain in the background

3. Fix the layout of the mountain

4. Adding detail to the foreground ground plane and the background

5. Correct the color of the shadow. (It's too dark right now)

There are also some other instructions, such as adding DOF and adding dust to the scene, but we decide to fix them in the next week and make the priority of this week be fixing the background.

After having the discussion with Professor Bridget, we have clarify that the key feeling we want for our background is a kind of vast and depth feeling. So based on these key words, we decide to change our background into a cliff, since that could help us better show the vast feeling and the depth of the mountain.

Below are some reference that we found for the cliff and the mountain:

Reference we found

(Reference 1 is the reference that I like most, I would try my best to recreate that kind of cloud)

And based on the insturction, we need to add fog for our scene, and that fog should help us to create depth of the scene too. To reach that goal, the best way for us is to use the Exponential Height Fog to create that depth.

But we got a conflict here. In order to get the best render result of the glass, we choose to use the color absorption funtion that is only avaliable in Path Tracer to create the glass material. The bad news is, Path Tracer don’t support Exponential Height Fog, or to be clearified, it only starts to support it since the newest 5.1 version, so it cannot act as good as how it did in Lumen.

Because of that, we need to find a way to solve that problem, or we can never get that depth we want for the mountian. After the discussion, we have come out two solution,

1. Stencil Layer: Use Render pass to render foreground and backerground seperatly. The foreground will render in Path Tracer, and the background will render in Lumen.

2. Use another way to create the fog for the Mountain.

So for the first solution, we have search for the Tutorial about how the stencil layer would work, and how to set it up. It looks quite like what we want for the fog.

And for the second solution, we have put our eye on one pulgin that is in the Unreal Marketplace, which is called EasyFog. As it shows in the video below, the result of it looks quite like the feeling that we want in the reference that we found.

Because of that, we seperate the work for each of team member. Jackson starts to learn how to set up the Stencil Layer, and make it work for our scene. I am going to learn how to set up the fog in EasyFog, testing the Exponential Height Fog in Lumen, and at the same time test out how it could affect the lighting in the scene. And Coleman is going to create the new background and the continue adjusting the skybox for our scene.

While Coleman is working on the background, I choose to use another background that I found from the Marketplace to test two different kinds of fog.

As it shows above, the first one is without any fog, the second is using the EasyFog, and the last one is using the Exponential Height Fog. It is clear that the Expnenetial Height fog would have more depth to the mountain, but the EasyFog could create more dramatic shape of the fog. So I dicide to use both of them, since EasyFog can also rendered in Lumen.

But then the bad news comes from the environment rebuild part. The new landsacpe seems too heavy to the scece, and it starts to do some weird thing to the skybox that we already have.

Screenshoot that Coleman send in Slack

As we can see, the color of the sky starts to become too orange and saturated. it almost lost that clear and pretty feeling that we have in last week.

Render we have in last week

I immediately list it as the top priority thing we need to fixed, since that sky is the key of our lighting and scene creation. I tried to adjust the color tint function inside Ultra Dynamic Sky and the Post Processing Volume to change the color of the sky, after whole night work, I finally got something similar to what we used have in last week.

It’s still a little bit different than what we have in the last week, but I am happy with the result that I got.

I start to add some fog into the scene by the use of EasyFog, and continue color correct the scene.

We decide to save the Stencil Layer and the Exponential Height Fog thing for the later week, since we starts to facing other issue when we tried to render our scene.

The Landscape starts to not shows up and continue crashing the Movie Render Queue because it is too heavy. So we have to manually delete the geometry of the Landscape.

At the time we almost delete half of the landscape geometry, the Render Queue starts to render.

And here is the final render result that we have for this week. Though it is not the best result, but we have tried our best to present it. And here it is: