Old Memories

Project status & Goals

First I want to talk about this project: Old memories. which was made up of many small environments, from which I created over 40 shots, which were finally edited into a short film. This work took a month.I want to see what happens when a lot of high-poly scanning objects work with Nanite and Lumen.

Reference & Inspiration

In most cases, it is extremely important to identify good references. This will be a great help to your entire production process.

However, I didn’t find a good reference for many scenes here, just a few pictures that inspired me, and I decided to start from them.

Actually, because I was born in the ’90s, I have quite a lot of memories of that time, and that became most of the reference in my mind.

These two images were the only suitable reference photos of similar objects, and I started my imagination on this basis.

Deciding on workflow and scenario content

There is no doubt that Unreal Engine 5 is a very efficient real-time rendering DCC tool, so I chose it. This project worked in Lumen while I used hardware-ray tracing to get better AO, reflection and soft shadow.

Before I started, I needed to determine what objects were in the scene, and their presence had to feel reasonable and coordinated.

In the PBRMAX team’s scan library, I selected the objects I wanted and put them together. And I quickly created something that wasn’t in the library. For example, the light bulb, pencil and calendar in the image, the texture was taken from the photo and I added dirty old effects to the basecolor map in Photoshop.

Scene Layout

This is a stage of imagination, I need to arrange the objects in the scene and try to make them look as close to life as possible, which involves thinking about people’s usage habits, thinking about where they would put these things. At the same time, try to keep your content coordinated, not too tight or too loose.

At this point, I have set up the Nanite Mesh for the objects in the scene.

This is a look at the number of triangles.  Before setup, these scenes could only be rendered in real time at an average of 20-25FPS.  When set, it can reach 45FPS.

This is a comparison of the numbers. Before setting up, there were over 20 million triangles in this desk scene, and after setting up, there were only over 200,000 triangles, which is pretty amazing.

At the same time, this provides enough smooth running frames that it will greatly improve your production efficiency.

Composition and setting up the camera

When starting to set up the camera, it is very important to determine the focal length, which affects how the picture will feel to the audience.

The camera focal length in Unreal Engine does a good job of restoring DLSR reality. In general, I usually set the focal length to 15-25mm, which is closer to what the human eye sees. For close-up shots, I might set the focal length above 50mm to mimic the effect of macro photography.

In addition, you need to pay attention to the height of the camera, a human standing eye level is about 1.5-1.7m, if your camera is too high or too low, your picture will look strange.

In the Unreal Engine’s Cinematic viewport, You can turn on the composition line, I usually use the central bisection rule or the thirds rule, To find the right constitutive relationship.

Using decals to enrich scene details

I really like to use decals when perfecting details. Because they’re really efficient and they guarantee performance.

Some of the decals I use come from Quixel Megascans. In addition I split the nodes using their parent material and overwrote a custom decal material.

This has been very useful to me and can be used to create almost all the rest of my custom decals. Here is a comparison before and after using the decal.

Adding some story to the scene

If you have a creative idea while you’re making it, you can add it to your scene. It will make your scene interesting.

At this construction site, I thought helmet were fun stuff, so I tried to get them to bond. I also added the appropriate advertising slogan (which means to remind you to be safe).

In China, Chinese chess is a traditional chess game. I found this interesting chess picture on the right from the fan forum and arranged the scene according to it.

Lighting

I like to use HDRI to create base light quickly, it’s really efficient. If set up properly, you can get realistic ambient light effects. There are usually a few things to note when setting it up:

1. Intensity: You need it to consider how it combines with the rest of the light.
2. Angle: HDR brightness information is very rich, please find your most needed Angle.
3. Size and height: They also affect the effect of lighting, try to set them to the best position.
4. An appropriate type of HDR image: This is the deciding factor, please choose the most appropriate match.

The other important thing about HDR is that it gives you rich reflections, which saves you time building areas that you don’t need to see. Like the picture below.

After that, I will add directional light, exponential high fog, and fill light as needed. Take a look at the following example of light dismantling.

By the way, if you find that Lumen is having weird shadowing problems when working with Nanite, you can check out William Faucher’s YouTube where he explains how.

Post-processing volume and output

This is where you can add some extra effect to your picture.

First, I’ll set up Bloom and Lens flare. There’s no fixed match, so you need to set them according to your needs.

I then set the film grain value, which adds some dynamic clutter to the picture. In these scenes I set the value to 0.5.

Then I will set appropriate Chromatic Aberration. The intensity and deviation are set as 0.3 here, which is also used to simulate the weak effect of lens in reality.

You can use the Settings in the Color grading to adjust the colors. In this project, I didn’t set too many colors, just corrected the color temperature occasionally.

The next step is to set the picture quality. For the most part, I just set the Lumen parameters.

This is the setup instructions provided in the official documentation.

Usually I just set the final gather quality and light quality, and raise them from 1 and keep them below 10, which is enough to achieve good results.  If it is too high, it will have a significant impact on performance and will not continue to improve the picture quality.  In addition, if you have very small objects in your scene, you can also increase the parameters of the scene detail.

Finally, I used Movie Render Queue to output 4K sequence frames and Premiere for editing. Due to the large number of frames in the sequence, I used 1X1 anti-aliasing for fast rendering, which by default is already good.

The above is my content to share, I hope it can be of some help to you. If you are interested, welcome to check my other works in Artstation.

Again thanks to the Games Artist. Thank you for reading.