Wednesday 30th November 2022:
After fiddling with floor trim for far too long, I was excited to work on the next big piece of the build and also move back to doing some unique textures. The wall directly behind the throne is an important asset, as it is where most of the lighting for the scene comes from, so I wanted to make a really nice texture for it early in this week, so I could overhaul the lighting and apply a Colour Lookup Table (CLUT) to my scene's post-processing volume, hopefully transforming the build.
I began in the usual way, by looking at my references and adding some details to the wall piece asset, before UV unwrapping it. The windows are quite decorative, but I intended to use stencils in Substance Painter to create a polished look, as hand painting the details would take far too long. The UV unwrapping posed an interesting challenge but I did my best to focus on preserving texel density and having nice even squares all across the model.
I started off my texturing work by sectioning out the different parts of the window and assigning them some basic colours to help differentiate them. At the same time, I also began working on some of my decals in Photoshop, using some of the details I had already made for the throne as a reference. I made these stencils in 4k, in order to try and make sure they would be nice and crisp when painted onto the model.
Once I was fairly happy with how the texture was looking, I decided to bring it into Unreal to see how the whole scene was coming together, and to see if I needed to go back and add more details to it, as well as to see if the opaque windows would allow me to overhaul the lighting of the scene. The first thing I noticed was that the opacity was much too high when in Unreal and you could barely see the details painted on the windows. I liked the overall appearance of the room with the windows in, but decided a second texture pass was needed.
I later realised that part of the problem was that I didn't have opacity enabled on the paint layers, so I had to redo those so that it would show up on the opacity map. I still wasn't completely happy with the look of the glass, but decided to go ahead and start working on my lighting and colour grading for the scene anyway.
While I am not very confident in using the variety of lights available in Unreal, I did my best to redirect a directional light so it would shine through my main window, creating a nice pattern on the floor as it shone through the detail pieces I have on the throne. The lighting looked a bit too warm, but I figured I could offset that by adding in a CLUT to my scene. Following the tutorial on the Learning Space (Pledger, 2020), I began by taking some screenshots from Unreal and putting them in a Photoshop document, alongside a neutral CLUT. Then I added several image adjustment layers to try and make my photos match the references I have of the film. I was mainly able to achieve this though reducing the saturation of the scene, which helped with the lighting being a bit too warm in my scene. Below you can see a before and after of the screenshots - I think the after looks much closer to the film. I then isolated the CLUT at the bottom of the document, saving that as its own image.
The next step was bringing this into the scene, which was surprisingly easy to do. I was actually very impressed with how simple this process was, and how much of a difference it was able to immediately make. For now, I am also happy with the lighting, although I would like to find a way to make the areas at the back of the hall a bit brighter, as the ambient sky light in the scene isn't reaching the far corners of my scene, and I want the whole scene to be visible for my renders and cinematic sequence.
I also changed the colour of the window details to be black instead of a dark gold, and found this really helped with the overall look of the scene. While I would still like to tweak the texture, as I think having the details painted on both planes of glass are making it a bit fuzzy, I am satisfied with how the whole scene is coming together finally, and I want to move my focus back to the hero asset of the scene - the throne.
References:
PLEDGER, Jon. 2020. 'Colour look-up tables' [online Learning Space lecture] Available at: https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/46be9562-7d15-462a-882d-cd3f94a238f7?referrer=https:%2F%2Flearningspace.falmouth.ac.uk%2F [accessed 2nd December 2022]
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