Thursday 8th December 2022:
As it was the last week of term, I had to make sure to upload a third lighting pass and basic test of a cinematic up to our class' Mural board. It took me a little bit of fiddling to get the muscle memory back for making cinematic sequences in Unreal, and of course, the layout and names of a few things seemed to have changed, but I was able to put together a basic cinematic of just over a minute during our final practical lesson of the term, albeit rendered at a lower quality as I wanted to focus on getting the cinematic uploaded. You can see that first pass of the cinematic below, on YouTube:
I was also able to fix the problem I was having with Unreal's auto-exposure this lesson, using manual metering mode in my post-processing volume instead of the previously selected auto-exposure, which I found was darkening my scene too much as I was moving around it to get screenshots.
I also took this time to look at optimising my scene in Unreal, making use of its many optimisation view modes to check important things like framerate and light complexity. I was surprised to see that my scene actually ran at a healthy 60fps with my engine scalability settings set to Epic at home, and was still around 30fps on the slowest of the DC computers (in Mint) with the scalability lowered to High/Medium for some of the settings. There were a few areas I thought I could improve upon, such as light complexity, but with a bit of a lighting overhaul planned for the Christmas break anyway, I was fairly satisfied with how my scene was running overall.
After focusing on the cinematic mini-deadline, I continued to work on the final part of the throne: the ravens.
I began by UV unwrapping the low-poly raven, again only bothering with one as they are exact copies of one another. I then brought the model into Zbrush and added some detailing around the face and 'feet' areas of the raven, trying to match my references as closely as possible. I admittedly didn't put as much detail into the ravens as in the film, as this was the final job on my throne list and the one that I had been putting off for a long time, but did try and at least add some interesting details for my later bake.
The baking process was fairly simple at this point, after having to do many other high to low poly bakes in both GART220 and 230, and the texturing was as simple as applying the same albedo, roughness and metallic values that I had saved from texturing the other parts of the throne. As the ravens are quite small, I chose to not bother with making the texture very high quality, and baked at around 1k output resolution, whereas I had been doing 2k for other larger areas of the throne.
I exported my maps and brought them into Unreal, ready to apply to my mesh. Initially, it didn't work and I panicked that I had somehow skipped over an important step, before realising I just needed to re-import my mesh with the UV unwrapped version, and finally all of my texturing was technically done!
As this was the last day of term at this point (Friday the 9th December), this means that I did finish everything in my backlog by the end of term, which was my original goal, in order to have time to go back and redo/add to my scene over the Christmas holidays. With this in mind, I made a new list in my Trello board, with all the things that I wanted to improve on, and finally rested - for a bit.
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