environment & recruitment
THIS WEEKS PROGRESS
Pitched to Sound Designer (got one!)
Pitched to Production Designer (got one!)
Sent letter to XR Stage manager for stage reservation
Began Environment Development (Lighting and Layout)
Built asset turntable / look-dev rig for UE
Designed Dropbox UE project pipeline with teammate Duck
NEXT WEEKS TO-DO
Environment Building (Layout)
Actor Recruitment
Production Design references and scale
To help relieve my teammate Duck with some asset work, I’ve begun the unreal environment. I’ve collected more specific reference from the national park we decided on, grand staircase escalante park, and begun testing out creating landscape materials.
An interesting side note, grand staircase Escalante is very popular for composite landscape astrophotography which gives us lots of cool references! Looking into the technology behind this is very cool; you have to take one set of sequence shots for the foreground to be in focus, and another for the stars. And each set needs different exposure and then you have to composite them together afterwards.
As of now, my unreal environment is below. I’m lucky because it will be out of focus in our designated shallow depth of field, which means a lot of our assets can be lower quality and let us run faster and less worrisome on the stage. Most of my work below has gone into the lighting and getting the shadows to match moonlight shadow references.
I’m pretty happy with what I’ve achieved with solely an HDR and Directional light.
It kind of looks like a halo 3 cutscene right now, I think because of the harsh geometry from lower quality assets. I think some camera motion blue and defocus will help alleviate this, and if worst comes to worse, I just update them to higher quality with the bridge plugin.
I’ve also spent the week pitching to a sound designer, Jacob Kreppeneck, and a production designer, Zoey Ball. Jacob has offered to do our sound design for us, and Zoey will be creating the rocks in the foreground around the asteroid. Jacob is pretty set, and has done some awesome action trailer sound production before, as well as worked on the volume before, so I am very confident he can do a piece without dialogue. For Zoey, I have to collect references and give scale as soon as I can so she can start. My last pitch I have to do is to an actor.
Again, feel free to comment below with any cool references, tutorials, or thoughts you have.
also created this lookdev rig real quick to help as me and Duck develop assets;
