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Final Outcome

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Why I didn't Make my own Sounds

At the start of the project my goal was to create my own ambient sounds for the cinematics, however this ended up not being a reality. The main reason is the lack of time I had to focus on creating sounds as it was fully on the cinematics and environment. Another reason is my lack of skills in the area, I think if I were skilled enough I may have been able to produce the sounds I wanted in time for my cinematics. It is not something major that I couldn't complete as I was able to find some free use sounds online that were up to my standards and suited the cinematics.

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Making End Title

I asked Chris for some input into my trailer and he said it was really good, however it needed a end title screen to finish it off. So I attempted to create my own within Davinci Resolve, but it looked horrible and did not suite the trailer in anyway so I had to make a proper one in Photoshop.

It was quite easy to do, I added in the name of the project as a starting point and moved the words around until I had them at a point I was happy with, then I used a font that wasn't too standard but more natural with flaws and rough edges, like tree bark. I then added a little coming soon at the bottom as many game trailers have that included and then finally I found an alder tree silhouette (creds: https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vectors/alder-tree-silhouette-vectors) as that is the type of tree used in my environment.

I am quite happy with how it turned out and now all that is left to do with it is add it to then end of my gameplay trailer.

Here is how it looks with the end title added on the end of the gameplay trailer:

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End Title Research

Alto

I have decided to take a look at Alto due to its title/logo, the thing that stands out to me in the logo is the lama head which is the main character in the game. I love the inclusion of it and I think its a really cool little detail.

(creds: https://altosadventure.com)

I love the way it is implemented and will definitely be using it for inspiration.

Persona

I am taking a look at persona because I love the way the title is designed and the font they use, I think as soon you see that font you instantly think of Persona. The red, white and black colour scheme mixed in with the bold outlines really makes it stick out and honestly one of my favourite titles from a game. However, I do not believe this would suit my cinematics in any way so I will not be using it for any type of inspiration. It is still good to look at to understand how different designs can make a game stand out

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Editing Cinematics

To edit my cinematics I have decided to use Davinci Resolve, I have had no prior experience but the same goes for premier pro so I thought there wouldn't be any harm in learning.

To start off I added all 3 of the cinematics into the project and laid them out in the order I wanted them to play. Then I added in some crossfade effects between each of the clips so that the transition between them was smooth and didn't disrupt the experience for the people watching.

After I had gotten the clips to a point I thought was good I moved onto Audio, as I hadn't made my own I needed to use some from the internet, specifically free use ones.

This is the audio I used for the forest ambience.

I used this audio for the grass footstep sounds.

And this is the audio used for the walking in water sounds.

I added all of these into the Davinci Resolve project, cut them to the lengths I needed, added cross fades in the same places as the clips to match the audio to the clips and duplicated them where I needed to.

Here you can see what it looks like with all of the audio placed in the project.

The final piece to the puzzle is a Title screen but that will be a separate blog post so here are 2 renders to show the progress throughout editing.

1st Render Made:

5th Render Made:

As you can see there are big differences between the 2 and also there is a place holder title screen at the end.

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Third Cinematic

For my third cinematic I needed to make sort of the opening scene to the gameplay trailer, and I knew of the perfect spot for this. An opening in the forest, trees surrounding the player, and a sort of path leading them towards the forest. This was the perfect spot.

As I still had the camera settings making the cinematic was easy once again, the only thing I had to change was the sun and its position. I wanted it to be above the trees the camera is moving towards so that it creates sun rays through the trees and creates some sort of over-exposure effect on the camera to enhance the effect of the warm colour of the sun.

For this cinematic I decided to be more creative with the cameras movement by implementing some looking around whilst walking forwards, I love the way this turned out as when the camera pans to the side you can see the way the lighting changes based on whether the camera is pointed directly at the sun or away from it.

I am really pleased with how this one turned out, it may even be my favourite one.

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Second Cinematic

Making my second cinematic was much quicker than the first as I knew what I was doing. I needed to find a different area in the environment though and I found a really beautiful spot that I felt needed to be captured in my cinematics.

For this one I really wanted to emphasise the illusion of walking with the camera and to do this I made it so about half way through the camera slows down and turns towards the area I am focusing on in the cinematic. I feel like this makes it seem more like a character exploring than a camera showcasing an environment.

I was able to duplicate the camera I used for the First cinematic so I was able to keep the colour settings and other camera settings, this made the process much quicker as I didn't have to colour grade it again.

Here is the final render I made for this cinematic, I love how it turned out with the warm lighting and the suns reflections off of the water. I think it really hits my target of stunning visuals.

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Creation of my first cinematic

To start with I began with building a small campsite with remnants of some past travellers that have gone mysteriously missing, however once you reach the campsite it is quite clear something fatal happened. I included a tent big enough for 2 people, 2 folding camp chairs, an extinguished fire place, a carving knife, a bad that belonged to one of the lost travellers and blood splatters throughout the campsite.

I purposefully placed the campsite at a small lake so that the scenes lighting can reflect off of the water and make the visuals more stunning, also it was the perfect position for sunlight as it bleeds through the trees onto the campsite and looks really beautiful.

After setting up the camp I placed a Cine Camera Actor into the world, this is the camera I used to create the cinematic. I positioned it moderately far away so that I can make the cinematic longer than 2 seconds and also to create the effect of walking up to the campsite.

To further enhance the feeling of walking up to the campsite I added a camera shake to the camera sequence, I think this is what made the largest difference to the cinematic as it gives it more depth and character and makes it feel more natural.

After I had gotten the camera movement sorted I moved onto colour grading, I wanted to give the scenery a warm orange hue from the light and to achieve this I increased the colour temperature of the directional light of the level as well as the colour temperature of the camera. The combination of these 2 has accomplished what I was aiming for.

After that all I needed to do was render the scene at 60 fps so it was smooth and at 1080p as to not take ages for rendering.

Here is the result:

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Adding PCG Trees into the environment

To do this I followed a tutorial as I haven't used PCG for almost a year and as such have forgotten how to use the system.

Here is the tutorial.

It is very straight forward and helped me a lot in understanding how to use the PCG system and implement it.

I needed to add this to build up the environment and populate it with more otherwise it would have been quite plain looking.

Here is a quick video of how it looks as of right now, there may be some more tweaks to adhere to what I want to achieve in my cinematics but this is quite similar to what the end result will look like.

As you can see the trees do not populate the whole environment, just the areas that will be seen in the cinematics. This is mainly for performance reasons as the pc is not powerful enough to keep up with that many trees.

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Adding MAWI Auto-Material

This was quite an easy and straightforward thing to do, I downloaded it, added it into my project files, then applied it to the heightmap that I just imported. It automatically added water, grass, rocks, snow and all the ground materials like dirt. This sped up development so much and made it of much higher quality than I could achieve personally.

Here is a look at it applied to the Landscape:

As you can see it has auto applied all the materials and grass and rocks that I would've wanted in the environment and made it much easier to develop the landscape.

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Using Heightmap For Landscape

Since I really didn't like how the Gaea Landscape turned out I have decided to take a look at using a heightmap for the landscape.

After looking up heightmaps there is a website that caught my eye (https://www.motionforgepictures.com/height-maps/), it has multiple high quality heightmaps in a few different resolutions depending on your needs. They seemed to be really good at first, but after trying to download and import them to UE5 I had nothing but problems like not importing at all, the heightmap not being as detailed as I thought and being way too small for what I need.

Because of that failure I decided to look into using a heightmap from real-life, and one place I thought of was Oeschinensee. It is a beautiful lake that sits under a towering mountain and is surrounded by a beautiful forest, I think it is the perfect place for me to build my environment off of.

(creds: https://swissfamilyfun.com/most-beautiful-lakes-switzerland/)

I found this website: https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/#4.47592/37.130/5.700

It allows you to find anywhere on Earth and create a heightmap out of it. So I found Oeschinensee on the map and created a heightmap of it, then imported it into UE5. Here is a quick look at it:

As you can see it doesn't look like much but It is much more detailed than the Gaea landscape and I think suites my target better.

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Trying Gaea

After taking a look at some different landscape generation software's I decided that I wanted to try out Gaea and make the landscape for my environment.

To start off I created a new project in Gaea, then in the graph I selected Terrain -> Mountain Range, this is because I am basing the environment off of mountains. This gave me a procedurally generated mountain range that you can tweak the settings of to change how mountainous it is, the height of the mountains and the seed (layout of the mountains). Once I had got this to a point I liked I moved onto adding some erosion into the landscape, I did this because I wanted it to seem more natural and seem like the mountains had been there for millions of years. You can change a lot of things in the erosion node so I will show a picture of the things you can do.

As you can see there is a wealth of settings that you can change to customise the landscape to your preference.

Next, I added in a river node as I wanted to include some in the environment and I believed this would be the best way to as it is procedurally generated and completely random and as such would look natural.

Here is a look at the final outcome of the Gaea landscape, I think it looks quite good although I am not 100% happy with it for a few reasons. First off after importing it into UE5 it looks much less detailed than in Gaea, even after tweaking the sizing multiple times when importing I am unable to get it as detailed as I want.

As you can see here it looks very washed out and much simpler, which I really do not like. Because of this I am thinking about trying out a Heightmap and seeing if that goes well, if not then I will use this but for now this is not going further in development.

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Basis Of The Cinematics

The entire basis of the cinematics I want to create are atmospheric cinematics of a beautiful environment that is built for a game. I want the cinematics to convey emotions to the watchers like eeriness, make them feel unnerved and that something bad is about to happen. I want this because I feel like it would create a really interesting contrast between the beautiful environment and foreboding feeling.

The environment/game is going to be set in the Northern Hemisphere, nowhere specific as to not violate any culture beliefs or violate any ethical rules, and will be about exploration of the environment and trying to figure out why the previous travellers before the player went missing.

The player will be a traveller/backpacker who is trying to follow a mysterious disappearance of 2 travellers in a forest up in the mountains, the reason the player is searching for them is because they were widely known figures within the backpacking community and respected as highly skilled and knowledgeable and as such their disappearance seems highly unusual and suspicious.

It will be set in modern day which means there will be modern things seen within the environment, such as a tent or backpack left behind by the missing travellers.

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Location Research

As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, I have always been interested in building my environment based on a mountainous biome in the Northern Hemisphere such as a mountain in Switzerland or France. This is because I really enjoy the natural beauty of these places and think it would look incredible if I managed to build an environment based on that.

(creds: https://www.naturetrek.co.uk/tours/go-slow--in-the-swiss-alps)

This picture is a great representation of what I would like to try recreate, snow-topped mountains in the background and a luscious green forest in the foreground that the cinematics would be based in.

I think this would look really good and help me achieve great visuals which is one of the things I am aiming for.

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Landscape Materials Research

Landscape materials are textures that are placed onto said landscape to simulate different things like grass, dirt, sand and more. I have used landscape materials a lot in my previous projects and so I believe I do have a lot of experience on the topic.

Throughout my time of using landscape materials to help me create environments I found them to be quite time consuming and slightly annoying. Because of this I did some research and came across landscape auto-materials. These are pre-set materials that you can download and import into your game project, then place onto your landscape, after which the materials will automatically be applied to your landscape based on the altitude of the surface. This makes the process much quicker than having to paint the materials on yourself.

I did look into some auto-materials and I have found a really good one on the UE marketplace from MAWI.

As you can see you are able to select different biomes, this will apply different materials depending on if you picked desert or mountains. Another thing you will be able to see is how snow may be applied if the altitude is high enough.

I think this is a very useful tool and could save me a lot of time when it comes to putting materials on my landscape. And because of that it is likely I will use it.

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Heightmap Research

A heightmap is a raster image that in each pixel stores values, such as surface elevation data, for display in 3D computer graphics. They are easier to use than software to create a landscape and also much quicker, but will not be as personal as they are premade and you cannot tweak little things such as how mountainous it is or the amount of rivers.

They are very easy to find by looking up heightmaps in google and clicking on any of the websites that show up. I think this is a really big positive for a lot of people as not everybody will have the time to go into a specialist software and spend days creating their own environment, and will instead look up heightmaps and find one they like the look of and use it.

Another thing that can be done with heightmaps is creating a heightmap of somewhere on Earth. There are a few websites that allow you to pick a square area on earth and convert the image into a heightmap that can then be imported into UE5 for example.

This is very appealing to me as I have always liked the look of some mountains in Europe and do think that they may make really good landscapes for me to build upon.

Because of all of this I will definitely be testing it out and keeping it as a viable option.

(creds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heightmap#/media/File:Heightmap.png)

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Research Into Landscape Generation

Gaea

QuadSpinner's Gaea is a landscape generation tool that is widely used throughout the games industry and has a wealth of features, I first heard about Gaea after watching a YouTube video about someone's landscape workflow for UE5. After this I decided to look into it further and watched some videos on it, namely the video below:

I decided to look at this video specifically because it mentioned creating an open world and that is sort of what I am aiming to do for the environment, create an open world and then make cinematics of the open world. This tutorial is really in-depth and quite informative, especially if you do want to create an open world. Gaea does seem like a quite straight forward tool to use once you learn how it works so I am considering using it to create my landscape.

World Machine

World machine is a similar programme to Gaea, but with a few differences. The main differences between the two are the UI, simplicity (to me) and modern feel. To me Gaea feels like a modern, up-to-date software full of powerful tools to generate brilliant landscapes. However, World Machine feels like an out-of-date programme. The UI is not as modern as Gaea and the tools aren't as intuitive and user-friendly as Gaea. All of these reasons that I have found after researching into this programme has made me understand that I would rather use Gaea to create my landscape as it seems like a much superior Software, compared to World Machine.

(Creds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTY_vj4UIEo)