Monolith

Key Responsibilities:

Design, Modeling, Texturing, UV Mapping, Rendering, Lighting, Baking, Compositing, Video Editing, 2D Animation, Material/Instance Creation, Shaders, Particle Effects, Audio Mixing

9/21/2022

Hey all, this piece is a bit of a personal one for me. I took a lot of inspiration from growing up visiting small islands with my grandfather on his tiny pontoon boat. The small pebbles become large crags as they progress inland which was a trait of many islands, but distinctly, Monkey Island (Yes, there is a real one) off of the coast of Beaufort, South Carolina was the one that I had in mind. Among other inspirations were; Stranger Things for the lighting and Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft for the concept of an oceanic monolith with a disappearing act.

The anchor for the scene, the monolith itself, was created in Maya and textured with a highly specular black colour in Substance before being brought into Unreal 5. The rocks were taken from Quixel Megascans before being tweaked in Maya to give them a bit more variety.

The lighting is using Lumen, which allowed easy real time corrections to be made during setup and provided some relatively quick renders. Most of it comes from the basic sun light, but I think the emissive effects are really what look most interesting. These were enhanced with additional, small point lights that are present within the scene and activate at key points in the animation.

I used two fogs, one generated using Unreal's built in tools and the other, a particle effect that used a rotating Taurus to give the illusion of the mist reacting to the portal's presence. This ended up being a great setup as it gave me a lot of direct control over the mist and allowed me to change the speed quickly and easily in the Level Sequencer.

Speaking of the effects, there are a lot in this scene. The portal was created using a single Niagara system with multiple emitters all acting in tandem. Each circle is its own emitter, a vortex of particles with tails following them with some slight randomization to create a bit of visual variety. The smoke is simply a default Unreal smoke animation edited to be a bit more visually interesting, using colour that changes over the particle lifetime it simulates the light coming off of the portal and just looks neat too. The light shards were created using alphas traced over photographs of shattered glass. This effect also used four sub-UV textures that I randomized to maintain visual variety.

The other systems employ similar techniques, but another one I wanted to highlight is a bit more subtle. When the portal opens, debris begins rising and at first I simply had textures of dirt chunks and rocks flying into its gaping maw. After closer examination, I decided that this wasn't my vision. So I created a simple rock in Maya, textured it using a material instance of one of the larger rocks and added it to a mesh-renderer enabled emitter attached to the portal's particle system. This means that instead of just textures being hurled upwards, the particles are 3D meshes. This really improved the overall look of the effect and while subtle, I think it goes a long way to sell the realistic look I was going for.

The only significant shader work was on the monolith itself. When the particle effect comes down and surrounds it, the monolith dissolves using a simple dissolve shader. I specifically used a texture that gives it sort of a glitchy look as it is being beamed away, to keep in line with the sci-fi theming. The dissolve shader used exposed values that I was able to key into the Level Sequencer which made timing the dissolve with the particle a cake walk.

There was a lot of experimenting in regards to the shot choice for this piece. I created four level sequences, each with their own set of focal length changes, black point adjustments and a few other small tweaks. The shot that I settled on starts at 250mm and then changes to 75mm as the camera backs away from the monolith. This gives us a digital equivalent of a dolly shot, something common in horror films that I wanted to incorporate in this piece. In addition, special attention was paid to give the camera a bit of physical weight when it begins to move backwards. The slight stutter I added really changed the look of the pullback and really gave it a cinematic feel.

Post was a bit more routine. Bloom, lens flares, a vignette, all of these things were added in engine before exporting to not only save a bit of time, but also reinforce my understanding of the ins and outs of said effects. Letterboxing, some additional blur and colour correction were added in Premiere which is where I also spliced in my logo and the audio. The latter was mixed in FL Studio.

The logo was created in Photoshop and then edited in After Effects to give it the slight wiggle.

Hit me up with any questions, thanks for reading all this.

Cheers,

Tanner M.

Work-In-Progress Post:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZeYlKR