EMPIRE - Unreal Engine 4 Realtime Environment

Unreal Engine 4 Star Wars Environment

Introduction

Hi guys! I am Tim and this is my entry for the Rookies 2022 in the Game Development category. I think the project fits in perfectly into the category as I think the workflow is perfect for the gaming industry or even the film industry. As I now have successfully graduated from PIXLVISN at Cologne I am really excited to enter this contest with this project.

In the following, I will show you my Star Wars environment and what my creative process looked like. 
Have fun and as always share your feedback!

I wish all other artists that have entered the contest the best of luck!

This Story of this project?

As I am a big fan of the star wars universe this project made a ton of fun. I wanted to recreate a short little shot of a scene with spaceships. That's what I had in mind when I thought of this project.

The little story behind the scene I had in mind? The imperium is in control of this planet. For a lot of years, there have been fights between the imperium and the rebels on and above the planet as you can see there is a crashed star destroyer in the background. Master Skywalker went on a mission to this planet and when he wanted to leave two star destroyers came up in the sky. Darth Vader has arrived because he knew that Luke was on the planet and followed him...

I rendered two shots. The first one is the main clip and in the second one, you can see the action from the side.

For my Composition, I decided to put the tie fighters more to the right and the star destroyers to the left. Only the crashed star destroyer in the background was in the middle. It's visually more appealing when you put objects more to the right or more to the left of the picture. The X-Wing flies from the right side to the left so it is crossing the screen and leads the viewer's eye through the picture.
If you would put a grid with 3 sections on it the Tie Fighter and the star destroyer would be about on the grid.

The Breakdown

So I started by playing around with Quixel assets. As they are easy to import into Unreal and of high quality they are perfect for the project. I saw a few images of the Star Wars Battlefront video game as I wanted to look for reference. I thought it would be perfect to combine this with the look of one of the planets that were featured in the Star Wars Rogue One movie.

When I had my main composition and camera done with the lava stones I added the tie fighters and the famous small signal tower. For this project, I only did the environment that will be visible on the camera at the end. After that, I also wanted to have something in the background so I added a few small mountains and the crashed star destroyer to fill the scene because that fits the story I explained at the beginning. All the models and textures I got from Video Copilots Star Wars pack.

The lighting of the scene was pretty simple. I used a HeightFog, SkyAtmosphere and a Skylight. There is no DirectionalLight in the scene so I could get the look from the reference images where it's almost rainy and very dense so you don't see many clouds only the fog and no sun.

To make the scene even more interesting and appealing I added smoke in some parts to give the viewer more of a lava planet feeling. For a few of the assets, I had to adjust the BaseColor texture because I didn't like the tone they had. Unreal makes it very easy to adjust texture files directly in the editor by playing around with sliders.

The animation part was very simple too. I keyframed the spaceships directly in the Unreal Engine sequencer. That means the animation will only be visible if you play the sequencer and not all the time in the viewport.

When I had my Renders done I wanted to push the look even further and decided to compose and color correct the images in After Effects. I love how the greenish colors give the whole image the film look I wanted. In addition to that, I added more contrast a little vignette and lens distortion.
I added even more smoke in the front and little particles. When the X-Wing is coming into the viewer's eye I added a camera shake and a little smoke wave to emphasize even more that we are standing right there with the camera.

Why Unreal Engine?

The project took me about three days to finish and was made after my school graduation as a training project to learn more about Unreal Engine and its Realtime possibilities. Unreal Engine is perfect for this kind of project because you can quickly block out scenes and get fantastic lighting results without rendering the whole scene again and again as you would do with an offline renderer. Thanks to Rrealtime. It's very user-friendly, the performance is good and for environmental art purposes it's my first choice.

The end...

So this was it! I want to thank you for taking a look at my project and my thoughts behind it. Feel free to leave a comment under this post and give me some feedback, that would be awesome! If you would like to get in contact with me you can use the information below.

Good luck to you if you are also entering the Rookies 2022 and thanks for watching!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-jagodka/

E-mail: [email protected]

Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/timjagodka