Justyna Butkiewicz

Environment Artist A place for documenting my research and practice | MSc Animation & VFX

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Final Montage

In my final montage, my gran narrates, and in a way directs, the video through a monologue. I asked her to talk about what memories certain photographs brought up for her.

This really helped me find a good balance between longer shots and stills with photo overlays, as the photographs fading in and out were somewhat distracting from the subtitles. The longer shots allowed me to showcase the full room while also providing some breathing room for the audience.

To finalize the video I added some adjustment layers that would help tie all the different shots and stills together. I used noise, scratch, dust and a vignette which helped pull the main focus into the center of the montage.

Scratch overlay used:

I'm very pleased with how the final montage turned out. I was very lucky to find a family video with music in it as it provided an authentic and unique soundtrack which complimented the monologue very well.

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Montage Overlay Sample

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Detailing the Cabinets

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Lighting Off vs On Render Test

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Lights On

Progression of adding emissive materials and point lights:

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Overall Progress

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Rendering Tests

Recently I've been rendering test shots overnight to catch any potential issues early but also so I can have a good idea of how much time I will need to render my whole cinematic.

So far, the same 5 second shot (24fps) has been rendering for an average of 3h 20mins.

Right now I'm thinking of going for 60 seconds worth of shots, making the total rendering time roughly 40 hours or a weeks worth of overnight renders without any errors.

I also want to look into reducing the noise that is quite noticeable in the most recent test below:

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Media Textures in Unreal

Since I want to have a family video playing on the TV in my scene, I started by looking into creating video textures inside Unreal.

I followed this video by VR Division:

After creating my texture I ran into my first major issue which was that the video was flipped, upside down and extremely zoomed in to one area of the clip. I addressed this by adjusting the UV map of the screen until it fit the whole video.

The second and less obvious technical issue I faced was video playback in renders. When I wanted to render a test shot, the screen remained black the whole time despite the media texture being applied.

After some trouble shooting on my own and looking through UE forums I learned that when rendering, everything you want to play/animate must be placed on the timeline. Once I followed these instructions, the family video finally played and I can now focus on adding further screen effects.

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Tea Glasses

An iconic item that's part of most older Polish households is the tea glass in a metal basket, another part of Russian influence during the PRL period. These glasses were used on Russian trains to serve hot drinks, with the metal baskets making them easier to hold.

I modelled this prop with the intention of reducing the polycount as much as possible since I knew modelling the intricate metal detail would be completely unnecessary for how small the object is in the scene. Instead, I created a plane that wrapped around the bottom of the glass and went on to use a mask I made in photoshop to add the striped pattern, similar to the doilies.

Final result in Unreal:

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Doilies

To create the doilies I started by creating very basic planes covering the areas I wanted them to be places on.

For example, I wanted one to be on top of the side table, with the ends hanging off, so I simply extruded the edges and beveled the corners for a softer edge.

I used doily patterns on black backgrounds as a base for creating the final textures. I achieved the final look by using masks for opacity and adjusting the height map for some dimension to avoid the final textures from looking like paper.

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Loose Ends

Some small things I finally addressed after ignoring them for too long:

Balcony door texture

Heater texture

Light switch

Sofa update (blanket cover)

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March vs Now

My environment at the end of March:

Vs now:

Detail:

Main areas of progress:

hallway modelled (90% finished, 2 textures missing)

textiles textured

lighting mostly figured out: down to playing around with settings and how far I want to push it

glass fixed

started on detailing (clutter, signs of use, personality, etc)

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Sound Lecture Notes

After the lecture on sound in film and animation I believe I have a better understanding of how I should approach sound for my project's cinematic.

For example, I added a few things to the list of sounds I should consider such as:

the sound of the room itself (buzzing, white noise)

pipes

electronic sounds we normally don't pay attention to

After learning about the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, I now also know that what I want to achieve will be through purely diegetic sound, or sounds that would actually be happening inside of the scene.

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Glass Rendering Issue

The biggest struggle I faced after moving onto using path tracing was how the glass was rendering. As shown below, glass placed behind glass would render as black which isn’t realistic, especially when compared to the reference image to the side:

After adjusting shader nodes and settings didn’t help, and after I couldn’t find relevant solutions on UE forums, I thought the issue could be caused by the mesh so I revisited my model and deleted all interior faces. As shown below, this helped to minimise the problem but did not solve the root of it. Although the glass is clearer, you can still see the stems of the glass behind rendering as black:

I then revisited the UE documentation and found a very thorough explanatory video about path tracing by William Faucher. In this video he went over glass in detail and helped me realise that my issue stemmed from my post process volume settings. In order to get rid of the blackness, I simply needed to increase the max bounces under path tracer rendering. An increase in bounces allows for light rays to penetrate further before being eliminated.

Results after increased bounces:

The left half of the glasses have my old glass shader applied vs the right having a newer simpler shader. In this example you can see the blackness is gone and the glass renders much more realistically. I also reimported my older model with interior faces included.

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Storytelling - Family

Since I’m basing my project on my family photographs I wanted to pull as many small and large things that represented various memories for me and that showed the audience what members of my family are like.

For example, the guitar my auntie Anna is playing in the below photograph, as well as the ink sketches my other auntie, Monika, had drawn and that I kept.

To model the guitar I first watched how a couple other artists approached the object. I started by creating a circle and extruding from there with subdivisions. For the strings I created curves and extruded a cylinder along them to match the width of each string for maximum accuracy.

While texturing I also added this sticker (seen below) for WOŚP, an annual Christmas orchestra charity event of a similar scale to Red Nose Day, which became a cultural symbol known and recognised by all Poles.

The ink sketches I simply pasted onto the textures of two glass frames I quickly modelled.

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Elements of Storytelling & Symbolism

Storytelling is just as important as lighting in my project. I wanted to create a simple prop that could be universally recognised as a symbol of childhood, such as colourful wooden blocks. I modelled the pieces to look as though a child had been playing with them and placed them on the carpet with the light spill acting as a sort of spotlight, highlighting its significance as the focal point.

Since I’d like to be able to showcase this area quite close up, I spent a bit more extra time on the texturing process, making sure the wood of the blocks was readable through the use of a wood grain height map and worn down paint around the edges. I also edited a quick product label for the bucket in photoshop using royalty free images.

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Final Project - Development of Lighting

When I came back to my final project about a month passed since I last saw it and the first thing that stood out to me was the lack of proper lighting. I decided to focus on this for the majority of my time before semester 3 as I expected it to present technical challenges, and I knew that good lighting would enhance everything else about my work.

This was my scene at the end of semester 2:

I wanted my environment to have a warm and welcoming atmosphere so I placed a strong directional light which highlighted the centre of the room and then adjusted the post process volume to achieve a grainy, photographic effect:

A major issue I struggled with for two weeks was rendering transparency realistically in real-time. As you can see above, the lace curtain is evenly and unrealistically illuminated with awkward harsh shadows, while the glass of the cabinet reflects black instead of the light of the window as it should.

I went through several different lighting setup tests as can be seen below. At this point I felt as though I tried every transparency shader set up I could with each achieving the same undesired results.

I learned that path tracing was the most realistic method of rendering within Unreal Engine 5, and when I switched to this method my environment (shown below) instantly improved.

The only downside to this rendering method is that it is not real-time and so the rendering process will take much longer, probably needing several render tests overnight. When rendering a 5 second test shot, I found that each frame took roughly 83 seconds to render, making the render time for 5 seconds around 3 hours. With this estimate, a cinematic of 30-60 seconds will need 18-36 hours of render time not accounting for any errors/changes that may occur.