Week 14: Cinematics and Camera Work

The final stage of this project involves creating a cinematic and selection of Beauty Shots. An immensely important stage as you could have high quality modelling, texture work etc but if it is presently poorly it will have no impact.

This would however be the stage where I experienced by far the most technical issues...

Anyway, to prepare I further lit up my scene, based on feedback from Louise. Several elements were still too dark and we're not reading well. I also added "Goodsky" an Unreal Store addition to add an extra element of interest to the renders and get away from the rather unpleasant looking "default sky/ clouds"

Can be found at:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/good-sky [1]

The next step was to simply place Cine Camera's around, making use of the cinematic viewports 3rds grid. One of these would become the main camera for my cinematic.

This stage proved to be slightly confusing, one recurring issue I had with said camera was a problem that would cause it to rotate 360* this was apparently a rather common issue and had a temporary fix shown which involved enabling incremental movements, this however caused an overall jittering feel to the cinematic, which led to William's solution which utilises a "Trigger Static Volume" which the camera would focus on and follow instead of the preestablished path's curve. This did create a nice flow to the cinematic as could focus on specific parts as it moved around the scene.

Beauty Shots:

An issue I found when taking screenshots was no matter how high I increased the resolution (even trying up to 4x) the image quality would not increase. Which was especially frustrating as in engine many details would look sharp but when translated to a HighRes screenshot they would look immensely blurred.

Unfortunately this was not the only issue, when fixing MORE problems caused by my glass material (everything behind look warped, which only happened in the screenshot version) as seen above. It also caused any depth of field effect to not apply to the glass, so where this would have been a nice effect I decided to forgo it as to not have obvious visual bugs.

To get around the first dilemma I found that increasing the Screen Percentage option would produce not only a higher resolution image but also solve this warping. HOWEVER this in turn created a whole menagerie of other issues I only noticed after taking screenshots as they were not occurring whilst in the Unreal game level.

These Included:

Minecraft style pixelated shadows

Random geometric shadow shapes

Random geometric light zones

Dashed rectangle lines across the entire level

Fun disco coloured roof squares

In the end the best result was achieved by having the ScreenPercentage setting set to 200% and overall HighRes Screenshot set to 1x quality. This meant there were very little visual glitches but also rectified my glass based rendering issues.

[1] Unreal Engine. (n.d.). GOOD SKY in Blueprints - UE Marketplace. [online] Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/good-sky. [Accessed 30 April. 2024].

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