And so, finally after many a long night and a whole bunch of learning it’s finished. I’m pretty pleased upon reflection, although a few nights ago I was all ready to throw in the towel as I just couldn’t get Unreal to render the camera properly, 12 hrs and a couple of good car journey thinking times, I untangled the problem.
There’s probably quite a lot I could say here, however a short list of elements that I’ve found useful to remember would be the necessity of ironing out the elements that will predictably cause difficulties. For myself, the issues were a slight nagging, or snagging issue towards the end when my rigs needed some last minute reanimating and I had to re export them, as you can see from the list of iterations here a good ability to organise helps.
After getting it all together I’d decided that some extra effort on the lighting and camera was needed. The lighting was really glaring with the ‘god rays’ I’d planned to implement, it left the overall scene too dark and a bit gloomy so I rejigged it with a couple of simple directional lights, positioned more overhead.
This was the result before the changes –
I was largely pleased but you can see the depth of field is huge, and the plants were swaying away like mad. I adjusted the wind on the plant materials and finally after many a frustrating hour, managed to understand and control the depth of field on the camera. It boiled down to a couple of settings –
And the result –
After 2 nights of tweaking the timing in After Effects and adding sound and music, here it finally is –
