For the final project, I wanted to create an environment that is more stylized than photorealistic. The environment I want to make is an overgrown forest with a fallen ruin as the centerpiece.
The scene is fairly simple with a few trees and a fallen tower, with a few rocks surrounding it. I wanted to make it into a night scene, and wanted to keep the skybox background, so I decreased the exposure to make it seem like night. To add to the night theme and overgrown forest, I added a firefly VFX to the scene as well.
Overall, it was a bit challenging to make the different materials on substance designer, and I also had some trouble with lighting. The material I disliked the least was the grass texture, since there still a bit opacity issues with the rock colour, and applying the texture on to the plane looks too repetitive and uniform. The trees were interesting to texture because all the objects in the scene are imported from unity’s asset store which came with textures, so re-texturing them did break a few times.
The leaf texture is a simplified and adjusted version of the grass texture, the stone wall texture has vines and moss in it and was the hardest to make.
The whole storyline of Fanxy Slime is character-focused, which is about an isolated slime finding its way to the home planet.
Concept
The film uses the third-person limited POV for linear storytelling, showing a slime’s voyage to find its home planet, aiming to explore the themes of loneliness and the search for a sense of belonging. The mood and tone of the film are full of adventure, fantasy, warmth, and childishness. The message the film conveys is that no one is an isolated island, everyone has their own planet, world, and cosmos.
Technically, I implement the immersive storytelling experience by using vast, rich scene transformations, such as glaciers, snow mountains, valleys, deserts, moon, etc. The continuous, rhythmical 3D soundscape immerses the audience in the plot development to fully enter the tale’s virtual world. The camerawork used is aimed at enhancing the sense of scale and fluidity of the landscapes from the third point of view. Also, I use the slime’s first POV, which means the shooting angle would be mainly from above or middle, with occasional shaking, mimicking a hand-held, the documentary feels. I hope that the audience can fully experience, and substitute into the character, slime, and feel its state of mind and progress. The whole artistic design is low-poly 3D with a pop colour style.
There are a total of five scenes, with six self-made shaders embedded. The story begins with the slime finding itself lost on floating ice. The second scene is the snow mountain. The third scene is the valley. And the fourth scene is the desert. I hope to create some trails as it moves. The slime will find a hot balloon which in this case is its spaceship. All four scenes mentioned above are arranged from low to high temperatures. In the final scene, the slime takes a hot-air balloon to the sky, then space, and finally lands on the moon. When the slime looks up to space, it sees a planet full of other slimes. At the end of the slime’s journey, the slime finally found its home planet.
For the assets, I bought a low poly terrain pack and a low poly slime pack. And I mainly work with the two, along with some free ones. All the models were re-textured and coloured.
In the very first stage, I switched the render pipeline to URP, and I built the environment for each scene first and tried to have an overall sense of the film. After I finished the environment settings, I moved on to animation and camera movements. I found that the floating ice can be affected by the falling cubes even when the gravity checkbox in the rigid body is unchecked. The camera transition in the canyon scene is fairly difficult because most of the views are blocked by hills, yet these hills are also important in creating spatial differences. I intended to play around with the point light and spotlight. Therefore, I placed several spotlights in the canyon to make the scene not flat. I tried rigid body and mesh colliders to make it walk in the desert rather than walk through the models. I did not find a solution for this problem, hence, I decided to rotate the slime and make it seems like walking properly on camera. And then, I timed the falling of the balloon, so I could have a continuous shot of the scene. I found that when I give the cubes a collider attribute and also a rigid body with unchecked gravity, they can float upwards when they contact the ground. Yet this trick did not work on the hot air balloon. Thus, I wrote a script so it could move upwards with other cubes. I also added a sphere collider and a box collider to the balloon, so the cubes would not go through the balloon model. After these essential animation settings were finished, I replaced the textures and materials with the customized ones I made in Substance Designer. The fabric material was intended to add to the balloon, yet the asset model somehow is not fit to the custom-made material, so I decided to use the fabric material in the last scene, which is placed on the slime’s planet. Besides that, everything went really smoothly in this finale stage. Eventually, I exported the video of each scene and conducted the post-production in a video editor by editing all the clips together, adding sound effects and background soundtrack, and inserting titles.
For my final project I wanted to create photorealistic shaders using Blender to populate an electric bike 3d model. I had originally made most of the shaders on UV spheres before I had finished the model so the biggest difficulty for me was scaling the shaders properly to the new objects.
For the seat adding the scratches in gave it a level of depth it didn’t have without it.
The rusted metal I think came out looking the most realistic and took the most time trying to get the depth of the rust to look natural.
For the tank I added in water droplets as well as animated droplets which is a bit to rough and if I was to take this further I would modify it a lot more as well as adding water to all the different shaders.
For my project, I wanted to create a realistic 3D environment. I have created a number of these in the past, all within Unreal Engine. I have a fair bit of experience with the program, and felt it was the best for creating a natural looking environment.
I started with creating the landscape itself, using Unreal’s built in tools:
This is the landscape after building the basic foundation: deciding where I wanted the beach to be, the lighthouse to sit, and where the water would be.
After that, I started grabbing assets from Quixel Megascans to use for the environment. Here you can see some of the cliffs that I used for the area in which the lighthouse would sit. The lighthouse model I acquired from Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/oFwUW
You can also see that the landscape materials have changed in this image. In the first image, I was using placeholder materials to get an idea of where I wanted cliffs and beaches to be. In the second image, I inputted the materials that I created in Substance Designer.
A dirt material with water puddlesDirt material without waterSand material (This is the same material I created for Week 9’s homework assignment, with some slight adjustments to a few of the nodes.Sand material with water puddles
After the materials were the way I wanted them, I started placing more assets from Quixel, and began blending the landscape materials to look more realistic. Here you can see some rocks I placed, and some blending of the materials on the right to create a path.
Once the materials were all blended and no more work was to be done on them, I started populating the landscape with trees and various other foliage to create a densely populated environment.
Finally, once everything was complete, I used Unreal Engine’s built in cinematic sequencer to compile a series of shots together to create a short video showcasing the work. That video can be found here on YouTube:
For my final project, I wanted to make a few shaders for an installation demo. I used both shader graph and substance designer
Here is the image of the hallway the player starts off in. The player starts off on the left and makes their way down.
The first shader I made was the crystal shader
with this shader I was able to make many variations of materials for different crystal types
Here are all of the crystal materials I made
Along with this, I wrote a script that added perlin noise that affected the crystals bottom color.
I then made a game obj for each crystal material and added the script onto each object and gave them differing random numbers so there would all have different flickering values and would be more out of sync.
The dissolve shader was also made in unity shaders graph
at first I tried giving it a node to insert textures onto the matieal to make it look more interesting, but that didn’t work out. so then I got the idea to simply copy paste my crystal shader and added it to the dissolve pattern and into the emission. With that I was able to make several disolve materials. I also made a script fro when the player object enters the disolve objects trigger, it will dissolve. The script allowed me to give each object its own dissolve speed.
I followed a substance designer tutorial for the pond texture I used
I then tried to make a shader graph to animate the pond but it didn’t work out very well.
I used my low poly crystal models for the crystals. The dissolve orbs were simply unitys 3d speheres. And I used a low poly nature pack for the forest area.
My idea for my projects definitely changed a lot. I didn’t even plan on origialy using shader graphs at all.
My first idea was to have a large dark room where the walls will show scenes of nature where the viewer is looking. However, directly behind them would be scenes of destroyed environments. And it would just be the area the player is looking at on the wall, the entire wall won’t play a clip. This way the viewer will have to move around to see what they could find. Later this idea evolved to having the viewer in a large room with 3d objects scattered around and the player could only see them once they get close. I changed the idea from a huge room to a narrow hallway since I found the large room disorienting.
I planned to make those “clips” in substance designer. I found a way to make animated textures in substance designer and just do all the trigger effects with c++. Before I got the textures ready, I first tested it out with plain materials made in unity. It didn’t work quite as well as I wanted it to so while exploring other ways, I found a tutorial on making fog in shader graph. Unfortunelt that fog only work for orthographic scenes. Since I wanted my demo to be like a game in first person, it didn’t work.
However, after that discovery, I found out that was a lot I could do with shader graphs. So I remade my idea and just went off from there.
I made a bunch of shader graphs from tutorials and got comfortable with it.
Honestly I was scared to use substance designer and shader graph because of the horrible experience I have with touch designer. But it was really easy.
In the end I’m satisfied with what I’ve got. I could definitely add on to it by giving the shaders some more effects. As for the demo itself, I need to fine tune the sounds.
I definitely departed from my original inspiration and ultimately opted to cut out the water shader I wanted to make because I took a full two days to get the grass and trees right. I figured scripting the water would take the project out of scope, so I went and looked for more inspiration, finding torii gates and moving towards the studio ghibli forest direction. The entire project took a full week of working almost nonstop to get it to where I wanted it to be.
I used blender to model the grass blades, trees, bushes (which are just treetops), and torii gate. All textures were made using photoshop and substance designer, and the rest of the scene setup, graphing and texturing was done in unity. The night scene with fireflies is the original file, and I duplicated it and changed the fog, leaf and grass colors, and swapped out some particle effects to get a windy day scene. The final video was cut together using after effects.
I followed many different tutorials to produce each animated effect, including the grass, trees, and particles, mashing all of the assets together to create my stylized scene. The shader graphs for the trees and grass are similar, using time and rotation (around the origin) to offset their positions to get swaying and wiggle effects. The grass shader also lerps between colors to create shadow on the individual blades. There are 2 different grass prefabs that I used to paint the terrain with, and the second one serves to add more color variation and shadow.
I found it difficult to find proper tutorials for stylized materials on youtube, so I used the more in-depth ones and manipulated the colors and some of the effects to create a more chunky look with my wood and mossy rock textures. They still looked a bit too realistic, so I adjusted the lighting, (adding fog and area lights), post processing effects, and color of their assigned materials later in unity to soften how they looked and make them more cohesive looking when paired with the trees and the grass.
After the scene was set up and all assets were textured and placed, I spent a long time working on colors and lighting. I really wanted to do a night scene but was almost completely discouraged because the lighting didn’t look right at all. I kept looking at concept art and amped up the concentration of blue in my composition to exaggerate the night shadows and lighting. I tried playing around with my falling leaves particle effect and made them emissive, and they became a really cool part of the scene. I think the particle effects add a lot of movement and interest and break up the otherwise simple scene, especially since the camera is static. I added a rigged, animated cat to add more visual interest and movement for this same reason.
I eventually settled on my lighting and colors (fog does a lot of heavy lifting in both night and day scenes), moving the assets in the background to adjust the depth of the scene for the final render, and playing around with the recorder camera settings and depth of field to bring the shot in angled and tight.
If I were to revisit this project, I would go back in and play around with painting the terrain to create some variation in the elevation. I cheated the scene by placing large bushes and trees in the background to simulate a larger forest/mountain situation, and placed my camera so that the top of the stairs could not be seen either. The scene itself is incredibly simple, and now that I’ve done the work of asset creation, I can spend time blocking a larger scene out. I would also love to add player/camera controls after I establish a proper layout and get this onto itch.io.
I’m incredibly happy with my first unity project, especially since I took the time to understand how my assets were built when picking and watching tutorials. I feel pretty confident in continuing to customize different animations and making new assets, eventually moving to build the scene up further – creating a level (or something level-like, at least) out of it.
For my final the goal was to create a space room which you can walk around in in virtual reality. My initial goal was to create a room that felt lived in with many objects scattered throughout and elements the player is able to interact with using their VR hands, Unfortunately this was an ambitious goal. Instead I ended up creating a more simple room inside of a large spaceship, the room has a sleeping area as well as a luxurious bathroom! I used a combination of substance designer created materials, In engine created materials, as well as materials from Unreal Engines Quixel bridge. I also populated the room with objects from Quixel bridge to get closer to the initial idea I wanted to achieve. I had a particularly good time building the shower area as it was fun messing around with unreal engine foliage and creating the fake nature scene.
This build technically works in VR but unreal engine does not seem to want to build the scene into a playable package 🙁 So instead rendered out some camera shots of the environment to show the shaders implemented in the scene.
Here are some screenshots from the scene:
Here you can see the materials I created in substance designer:
I had issues with my displacement maps in unreal engine so had to use the modeling displacement tool which did not give me the displacement I wanted (what substance designer showed)
For this week’s homework, I followed the tutorial to make medieval fabric, I really like making embroidery on various types of fabrics so I really wanted to try this tutorial. While researching I came across the embroidery generator in substance designer which can be helpful in my other classes as well as I can export my work from adobe illustrator and bring it to the substance designer to have the embroidery effect. In regards to creating the medieval fabric, substance has the tile sampler which has so many options for experimentation. I created a mask by adding the image below as bitmap to make the pattern I liked.
At first,I was unable to output the materials as a bitmap at the end and couldn’t figure out if I missed out anything in the tutorial but I was able to render the material, all over the fabric design turned out very well.
Link to the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkzxq7SV1Gw
For my final project proposal, I want to make a music player for my final project using Unity and Substance Designer. Below is my inspiration as well as my conceptual image which is picked up on Pinterest. I think this picture brings a quiet and mysterious atmosphere, so my intention is that users can enjoy music quietly in such a relaxing environment. This project is also a challenge for me because I have never used Substance Designer to make materials before, but I have seen some works made by previous students, which is very inspiring and makes me look forward to making excellent materials through this powerful software.
Final showcase:
In my final project, I created five materials totally using Substance designer, which are the texture of the plane, column top, column bottom, rock and character. To interact with the project, players should click each column top to trigger the audio clip( which continues for about 10 to 15 seconds). The skybox(Unity assets), character model(Mixamo), rock models(Unity assets) and petal particle(Unity assets) are all online assets. Some of them were not in my project schedule but were added finally to increase the visual enjoyment.
I followed the tutorials on Youtube but adjusted a little bit to keep the harmony rather than completely copy what is taught in videos. I used to meet the lighting problem in Unity, in which the light doesn’t work except for the directional light. Afterwards, I found that this is caused by enormous model sizes. Specifically, if the model is larger than the standard cube too much, many functions will meet problems when run(mine was 100 times larger). For example, once I imported the texture to the model, it looked different from how it looked in the texture ball, which becomes rough and graceless(so the solution is narrowing them down and the light system restores after then).
To accomplish this project, I wish to get comfortable working with the fundamentals of P5.js and GLSL editor. I plan to start creating different GLSL editors focusing on different calming elements such as sunsets, rain, and cherry blossom trees.
I will use visual techniques such as linear interpolation, noise generation, texture generation, and color manipulation to create visual effects. I will also add an audio file containing calming sounds like waterfalls, rain, and birds to add an immersive and relaxing feel to the video. I may also consider using one of my favourite OST/music over it to create a music video
I believe this project can be a great way to learn and master p5.js while also creating something that is visually appealing and calming for people to enjoy.
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A dirt material with water puddles
Dirt material without water
Sand material (This is the same material I created for Week 9’s homework assignment, with some slight adjustments to a few of the nodes.
Sand material with water puddles
