So I started this project about a year ago, when I was
planning to apply for a position in the videogames industry later that
year. Meanwhile, I was invited to come work at Elite3D, in Valencia,
Spain, and so this project lost a lot of attention from me. Still, I
would very much like to finish it, since I feel it has a lot of
potential, I like the challenge I set upon myself of recreating a Star
Wars environment in Unreal 4, and I simply would love to see how it
would turn out. So I have been working on it whenever I have some free
time.
I recently finished the blockout phase, which, as you know, is of extreme importance to set the base for the rest of the phases.
Here are some comparative images between the movie and my blockout work:
So I'm in the middle of animating the door with blueprints, which opens when I approach,
closes when I step back. But if I approach the door while it is closing,
I want it to interrupt the closing animation and reverse to reopen.
So I
have this Branch node that says "if an animation is playing, stop,
reverse; else, play (until the end of the closing animation)". But the
"is playing" node is not working as expected, because as soon as I hit
Play and approach the door for the very first time, it won't open,
because it reads that the opening animation itself "is playing" already. In other words, it triggers sooner than expected... I think this is
because the "Is Playing" node expects a skeletal mesh component as
target. I only have the one for the door to give it, so it will always
trigger. And even if I duplicate it and use one copy of the skeletal
mesh component node for the begin overlap trigger and the other copy for
the end overlap trigger, it will still read it as being the same. I
don't understand why it reads as already "playing", since it is not, it
would only play now for the first time. So I'm not sure if it's a bug or
not. Help?
I am using Matinee for the animation of the door opening/closing, because I wouldn't be able to animate it the way it happens in the movie otherwise.
Jorge, i think the best way would be to put a trigger box as collition in the door ratio that you want it to be affected and then you would just need to call that trigger box in the blueprint as an actor telling it to start the function when you hit that collition.
Hey Seehr! Nice to see you here! Sorry for the late reply, I wasn't notified about yours, don't know why, so I only saw it now -_-' . I was trying to do it with an exported full animation from Maya because the door has this animated piece that moves along with it, so it seemed to me it would be tricky to parent one thing to the other, and animate them individually and altogether at the same time. I have been receiving help on Facebook on how to solve the problem I was facing with Matinee, you can check it [here] if you'd like to see what I have been going through ^_^' But that one is now seeming to me like a poor solution, as it's giving me way too many problems, so I might indeed try it with Timeline animation. From what I understood, that's what you're suggesting, right..?
Meanwhile, I moved a little bit away from it and started detailing some pieces, lighting up the scene and creating the starscape + planet right outside the window. I only have light from the exterior for now, will work on the interior lighting soon. Here are a couple images of how it looks like at the moment:
Little update, been playing with the lighting inside the room, trying to make it match the original footage as much as I can. Note that most of the modeling is still in the blockout phase, plus, obviously there's still no textures whatsoever:
I'm having trouble with the light that should come from the emissive meshes. Since there are no area lights in Unreal, I've been trying some workarounds, but every "solution" I find on Google does not seem to work according to what I expect. I'm not being able to get the result I want yet
It's been a long time since my last update, (graphics card gone wrong was the main reason, as well as lack of enough free time to advance things far enough to deserve showing), but I finally have something worth posting There are no textures/materials yet.
The assets in the room are mostly already final, most only miss proper UVs and textures. In the corridors, there is still a whole lot to do.
I was able to sort out something regarding my previous lighting problem with the emissiveness and lack of area lights in the engine. I'll leave the lighting as it is for now, and keep pushing all the assets to their final version. Will see what needs adjusting after texturing/shading phase
Hey artizan, thanks for taking the time to comment! I am very much aware of the lack of accuracy, I've analyzed the original footage and make sense of it all, but unfortunately they didn't build a whole spaceship in real life so that everything would be perfectly coherent I'm guessing that they prepared a few dioramas of the inside and didn't care much whether they would make complete sense as a whole, as well as still respecting the shape of the ship as we see it from the outside. Of course, we as spectators don't even notice anything wrong with it when watching the film. But when reconstructing it, I realize not all elements from the different shots of the film seem to make perfect sense together. And since I am building this environment as a whole, things do have to fit and work together. So I had to compromise some elements a bit. I'm still gonna take a further look at some aspects of it, though, as I'd really like to come as close to the reference as possible..
I've been doing veeeery slow progress on this. As with any big project, I have my phases of high and low productivity, or there's just other things to do with my free time. But I've been managing to keep this project alive
So this is my most recent progress, I still have some modeling to be done on the doorway and the floors modules, as well as on the Corridor Wall module and then adapt it to the similar modules in the inner ring corridor.
Apologies for the lack of updates! I have been working on this on my downtime, which has been quite little, but still allows me to move forward a tiny bit every now and then! I have finished the modeling, lately I have been working on finishing up the UVs for everything (texture UVs and lightmap UVs, which is a lot to do), and then I'll have to work on the final version of the textures before reworking on the lighting. Anyways. I will try updating this thread quite soon with some cheeky screenshots!
I feel you should tone down the light from the planet a bit. It's a bit distracting and overpowers the lights when present. Cool work!
Oh yeah Ashervisalis, I won't discuss that, I totally agree with you! But the lighting is not final yet! I still need to have the final version of the textures in, so that I can see exactly what needs to change Lighting-wise! Many thanks for taking the time to comment, very much appreciated, and be sure I will definitely take your opinion into consideration! ^^
Nice, this is neat. Were you looking at this as a scene in a game? or just visually to match the film? I'm sure things will be slight different, a tad bit, having it in a game setting. It looks great, though. There are a few things that are off just a bit, might be just the camera perspective or FOV, but aside from that, it's pretty neat all around.
loving the scene! so far the only thing I can really suggest is to maybe make the lights slightly warmer?( for the dining area) and definitely a little brighter so that you can see the light hit the walls. And for the hallways, perhaps make the lights from the above cooler?
Thank you very much for taking the time to leave a comment, guys!
Yeah, like I mentioned, lighting is still not final! I'm still postponing the final lighting until i have the final textures and I did face a whole lot of problems with proportionality I had commented on that previously, when i replied to artizan
Hey artizan, thanks for taking the time to comment! I am very much aware of the lack of accuracy, I've analyzed the original footage and make sense of it all, but unfortunately they didn't build a whole spaceship in real life so that everything would be perfectly coherent I'm guessing that they prepared a few dioramas of the inside and didn't care much whether they would make complete sense as a whole, as well as still respecting the shape of the ship as we see it from the outside. Of course, we as spectators don't even notice anything wrong with it when watching the film. But when reconstructing it, I realize not all elements from the different shots of the film seem to make perfect sense together. And since I am building this environment as a whole, things do have to fit and work together. So I had to compromise some elements a bit. I'm still gonna take a further look at some aspects of it, though, as I'd really like to come as close to the reference as possible..
So yeah, I had to take bits from here and there, from different stills, to be able to make the scene - a lot of guess work, and the rest is just what is possible with the space that I had left... And like you say, garcellano, it would definitely help to know what FOV they used for the film - if they used one and only one!... because in order to match the same stills, I do have to change between two different values ^^' So yeah, I am very aware of things being off, but I decided to leave it as is, as changing now would mean DRASTIC changes, and I really can't afford that
Yeah, I was looking at this as a scene in a game, I wanted to have it as being a playable environment (i'm planning to have my B1 Battle droid playable ), but I also wanted to match the reference as close as possible
It has already been too long since I last updated this thread, I wish I could make progress on this project a lot faster than I'm able to, but these lightmaps, man... They ruin me... x)
Anyways, here's how things are looking like at the moment:
I was thinking I'm quite near completion, with just some small adjustments to be done, when Realtime Raytracing was announced earlier this year.. Boy, that made me flip my table a number of times.. I didn't want to buy an RTX graphics card just for the sake of this project, but lightmaps do take more than 1 hour to just render in Preview mode, it probably wouldn't calculate the final Production render during my lifetime.. And more recently I started thinking I might actually be needing an updated computer anyways, so I'm now seriously planning to buy a new one, open this project on it and just bypass lightmaps and do it all in realtime with raytracing I hope everything goes smoothly, as I'm yet to see what kind of troubles I might be running into with such transition (like, does it mean I may now finally have any number of dynamic lights in the scene without Unreal shutting them off if more than 4 overlap? And also, all lighting will most likely have to be reworked, especially the Global Illumination part of it, in order for it to look good in realtime this time around...)
In the meantime, I have also worked on animating the droid to be either playable and an NPC, here's a quick peek at behind the scenes:
So yeah, hoping to finally conclude this project within a few more months!
And please do let me know if you have any tips on how to go about raytracing!
Your lighting is excellent, and materials are reading quite nicely as well. This is super inspiring.
One thing I keep noticing is that this window is a bit stubby in your version, proportions-wise, compared to the reference:
I know you said you aren't able to match proportions 100%, which I get, but I think this would be a fairly straightforward update that would help it out a lot!
@JorgeBarros What a damn beautiful environment ! really close to the films, it's just delightful for a star wars fan Despite I just love what you've done, I think there could be some adjustments about colors of the panels on the ground, about the clear parts which seems too bright/yellowish compared to the film ones. Yours adds some warmth to the atmosphere, which is most welcome in these corridors, but maybe they could tend to be more frosty to mimic a little more the original set mood. But again, your work is already excellent, I'd love to play this little dude just to explore a bit more this star destroyer ♥
@Carabiner I think it could be a matter of perspective between these two shots, right ?
I think adding a slight blue tint in post would help the scene a lot. Also, in the first image, the beams near the ceiling look too white, maybe push their colour more towards grey?
Looking cool! Hopefully we can see the end result sooner than later
Thank you so much for taking the time to give me some feedback, guys, I'm addressing each one individually
@Carabiner I agree with Vexod14, I believe it may be a matter of perspective. Please take a look at the following images, notice how short those "doors" really seem to be: they're about the same height as Qui-Gon Jinn while sitting, which is what I tried to respect:
(notice how my camera is positioned pretty much the same way as the movie's, having the top of the chairs aligned with the top of those frames)
One thing that I do have very wrong is the distance between that wall and the table, and that may be the reason why it seems off to you And I'm feeling like I still didn't get the camera's focal length value quite right Thank you for the very kind words, much appreciated! ^^ (I'm so curious to see Cold Iron's Alien game!!)
@Vexod14 Very happy to see you here again! Thank you so much for the wonderful words! And you're absolutely right, I will definitely tweak these materials in order to bring them closer to the reference just like you suggested!
@Ashervisalis Yes, totally right, a blue tint in post is definitely planned to at least be tested! And my man, you have no idea how much I battled to not have those beams as bright... If I tone down the light sources that affect them, the whole scene becomes too dark, and if I try faking it in some other way it just won't want to work right. I'm leaving that one for later, as well as a few more issues, to try and fix with the switch to realtime raytracing; hopefully the fixing process will go a whole lot smoother with it!
@JorgeBarros Thanks! So I think you're right about perspective for those windows, but I actually meant the center window/inset between the doors (sorry, my arrow was unclear). It looks squashed in your version compared to the reference, like it should extend up taller and maybe further down -- even when you match the camera angle like you've done.
Oh I see what you mean! You're right, I think it's the doors being further apart that cause that impression. Looks pretty good to me when I see it from this angle
I'm very glad to announce here on polycount that I was finally able to bring this project to a conclusion, with raytracing and all!
Check [my ArtStation] for a cinematic + gameplay videos, high resolution images and 360º panoramas Leave a comment if you'd like, and let me know you went from here!
Your B1 battle droids are looking a bit too warm/yellow. In the reference for the hallway the lighting/color grading is very cold and blue, yours is leaning more white.
Some feedback; your darks are too dark. Take a look at the area just above the windows in your render:
vs how light those areas are in the movie;
It looks like there's even a second layer in there that you might be missing. Also see the bottom of the back of the chair; yours is significantly darker.
The planet lighting reflection is great but it's really saturated compared to the original film, which was a soft glow. Notice you can distinctly see cloud formations in the reference all the way up to the horizon of the planet, whereas in your skybox the planet gets blown out at the terminator line.
Would you consider throwing a post process FX volume over the whole scene as well to get some of that soft grey film artifacting in there? I think that would be heckin dope lol.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to leave a comment, and feedback, guys Unfortunately, after 5 years of production, this last post of mine was announcing that I had finally published it, so it's a bit too late for changes Some of the feedback you gave I was already aware of, I do know I didn't make a perfect job, but due to it being so difficult to control secondary bounces of light (Global Illumination) and the lightmaps taking forever to just give me a preview of any changes, I ended up giving up on striving for perfection, as I need to move on to new projects.. I hope you don't get mad at me (: Many thanks again!
I am, in any case, planning to release the playable demo soon, so I may be able to make some quick adjustments in post process, hopefully it will look a little bit bettter As for my following couple projects, they won't be Star Wars related, but it's very likely I'll want to go back to it some time All the best to you too! We'll be in touch
By the way (and as another fan-game developper), may I ask you what's your point of view about legal "state" ? Like do you feel it's completely okay with disney/EA or not, I'm really interested to know your point cause I feel strange when it comes to figure out how I could possibly publish publicly mine safely too
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure if I'll have any problems with them or not if I release it either... I don't know how these things work, but my opinion is that, if we're obviously not making any profit whatsoever from it, then it should be allowed.. I know there's people SELLING t-shirts, caps, etc, even covid masks lately, unofficially bearing Star Wars characters and stuff, and nobody does a thing about those... We are not making any profit, but since we go digital, we are an easy target, as they can easily tear the project down and identify the person responsible for it... it really sucks...
Replies
So I started this project about a year ago, when I was planning to apply for a position in the videogames industry later that year. Meanwhile, I was invited to come work at Elite3D, in Valencia, Spain, and so this project lost a lot of attention from me. Still, I would very much like to finish it, since I feel it has a lot of potential, I like the challenge I set upon myself of recreating a Star Wars environment in Unreal 4, and I simply would love to see how it would turn out. So I have been working on it whenever I have some free time.
I recently finished the blockout phase, which, as you know, is of extreme importance to set the base for the rest of the phases.
Here are some comparative images between the movie and my blockout work:
Looking forward to updating this thread soon!
So I'm in the middle of animating the door with blueprints, which opens when I approach, closes when I step back. But if I approach the door while it is closing, I want it to interrupt the closing animation and reverse to reopen.
So I have this Branch node that says "if an animation is playing, stop, reverse; else, play (until the end of the closing animation)". But the "is playing" node is not working as expected, because as soon as I hit Play and approach the door for the very first time, it won't open, because it reads that the opening animation itself "is playing" already. In other words, it triggers sooner than expected... I think this is because the "Is Playing" node expects a skeletal mesh component as target. I only have the one for the door to give it, so it will always trigger. And even if I duplicate it and use one copy of the skeletal mesh component node for the begin overlap trigger and the other copy for the end overlap trigger, it will still read it as being the same. I don't understand why it reads as already "playing", since it is not, it would only play now for the first time. So I'm not sure if it's a bug or not. Help?
I am using Matinee for the animation of the door opening/closing, because I wouldn't be able to animate it the way it happens in the movie otherwise.
Animation of the door - playblast from Maya: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1293131/door_01_test.mov
Sorry for the late reply, I wasn't notified about yours, don't know why, so I only saw it now -_-' .
I was trying to do it with an exported full animation from Maya because the door has this animated piece that moves along with it, so it seemed to me it would be tricky to parent one thing to the other, and animate them individually and altogether at the same time. I have been receiving help on Facebook on how to solve the problem I was facing with Matinee, you can check it [here] if you'd like to see what I have been going through ^_^' But that one is now seeming to me like a poor solution, as it's giving me way too many problems, so I might indeed try it with Timeline animation. From what I understood, that's what you're suggesting, right..?
Meanwhile, I moved a little bit away from it and started detailing some pieces, lighting up the scene and creating the starscape + planet right outside the window. I only have light from the exterior for now, will work on the interior lighting soon. Here are a couple images of how it looks like at the moment:
I'm having trouble with the light that should come from the emissive meshes. Since there are no area lights in Unreal, I've been trying some workarounds, but every "solution" I find on Google does not seem to work according to what I expect. I'm not being able to get the result I want yet
There are no textures/materials yet.
The assets in the room are mostly already final, most only miss proper UVs and textures. In the corridors, there is still a whole lot to do.
I was able to sort out something regarding my previous lighting problem with the emissiveness and lack of area lights in the engine. I'll leave the lighting as it is for now, and keep pushing all the assets to their final version. Will see what needs adjusting after texturing/shading phase
I am very much aware of the lack of accuracy, I've analyzed the original footage and make sense of it all, but unfortunately they didn't build a whole spaceship in real life so that everything would be perfectly coherent
I've been doing veeeery slow progress on this. As with any big project, I have my phases of high and low productivity, or there's just other things to do with my free time. But I've been managing to keep this project alive
So this is my most recent progress, I still have some modeling to be done on the doorway and the floors modules, as well as on the Corridor Wall module and then adapt it to the similar modules in the inner ring corridor.
So here you go some screenshots:
Apologies for the lack of updates! I have been working on this on my downtime, which has been quite little, but still allows me to move forward a tiny bit every now and then! I have finished the modeling, lately I have been working on finishing up the UVs for everything (texture UVs and lightmap UVs, which is a lot to do), and then I'll have to work on the final version of the textures before reworking on the lighting. Anyways. I will try updating this thread quite soon with some cheeky screenshots!
There are a few things that are off just a bit, might be just the camera perspective or FOV, but aside from that, it's pretty neat all around.
Yeah, like I mentioned, lighting is still not final!
and I did face a whole lot of problems with proportionality
So yeah, I had to take bits from here and there, from different stills, to be able to make the scene - a lot of guess work, and the rest is just what is possible with the space that I had left... And like you say, garcellano, it would definitely help to know what FOV they used for the film - if they used one and only one!... because in order to match the same stills, I do have to change between two different values ^^' So yeah, I am very aware of things being off, but I decided to leave it as is, as changing now would mean DRASTIC changes, and I really can't afford that
It has already been too long since I last updated this thread, I wish I could make progress on this project a lot faster than I'm able to, but these lightmaps, man... They ruin me... x)
Anyways, here's how things are looking like at the moment:
I was thinking I'm quite near completion, with just some small adjustments to be done, when Realtime Raytracing was announced earlier this year.. Boy, that made me flip my table a number of times.. I didn't want to buy an RTX graphics card just for the sake of this project, but lightmaps do take more than 1 hour to just render in Preview mode, it probably wouldn't calculate the final Production render during my lifetime.. And more recently I started thinking I might actually be needing an updated computer anyways, so I'm now seriously planning to buy a new one, open this project on it and just bypass lightmaps and do it all in realtime with raytracing
In the meantime, I have also worked on animating the droid to be either playable and an NPC, here's a quick peek at behind the scenes:
One thing I keep noticing is that this window is a bit stubby in your version, proportions-wise, compared to the reference:
I know you said you aren't able to match proportions 100%, which I get, but I think this would be a fairly straightforward update that would help it out a lot!
@Carabiner I think it could be a matter of perspective between these two shots, right ?
Looking cool! Hopefully we can see the end result sooner than later
@Carabiner I agree with Vexod14, I believe it may be a matter of perspective. Please take a look at the following images, notice how short those "doors" really seem to be: they're about the same height as Qui-Gon Jinn while sitting, which is what I tried to respect:
One thing that I do have very wrong is the distance between that wall and the table, and that may be the reason why it seems off to you
Thank you for the very kind words, much appreciated! ^^ (I'm so curious to see Cold Iron's Alien game!!)
@Vexod14 Very happy to see you here again! Thank you so much for the wonderful words! And you're absolutely right, I will definitely tweak these materials in order to bring them closer to the reference just like you suggested!
@Ashervisalis Yes, totally right, a blue tint in post is definitely planned to at least be tested! And my man, you have no idea how much I battled to not have those beams as bright... If I tone down the light sources that affect them, the whole scene becomes too dark, and if I try faking it in some other way it just won't want to work right. I'm leaving that one for later, as well as a few more issues, to try and fix with the switch to realtime raytracing; hopefully the fixing process will go a whole lot smoother with it!
I didn't nail it, the doors should have come a bit closer to the window, but I don't think the window's squashed, at least not considerably?
Leave a comment if you'd like, and let me know you went from here!
[Cinematic video][Gameplay Demo]
Thank you so much, everyone, for your constructive feedback! It was a pleasure sharing my progress with you!
May the Force be with you, always
Some feedback; your darks are too dark. Take a look at the area just above the windows in your render:
vs how light those areas are in the movie;
It looks like there's even a second layer in there that you might be missing. Also see the bottom of the back of the chair; yours is significantly darker.
The planet lighting reflection is great but it's really saturated compared to the original film, which was a soft glow. Notice you can distinctly see cloud formations in the reference all the way up to the horizon of the planet, whereas in your skybox the planet gets blown out at the terminator line.
Would you consider throwing a post process FX volume over the whole scene as well to get some of that soft grey film artifacting in there? I think that would be heckin dope lol.
Unfortunately, after 5 years of production, this last post of mine was announcing that I had finally published it, so it's a bit too late for changes
Many thanks again!
Next project is better most of the time
All the best Jorge
As for my following couple projects, they won't be Star Wars related, but it's very likely I'll want to go back to it some time
All the best to you too! We'll be in touch
By the way (and as another fan-game developper), may I ask you what's your point of view about legal "state" ? Like do you feel it's completely okay with disney/EA or not, I'm really interested to know your point cause I feel strange when it comes to figure out how I could possibly publish publicly mine safely too
Well, I hope you won't go in any trouble (and I secretly hope that your creation will lead to more prelogy games, fan made...or official
All the best my friend
I have just made available (for free, of course!) the Game Demo for my project!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/motiwiimcsoxt7l/StarWars_DroidControlShip.rar?dl=0
Hope you enjoy it!
Thank you so much for bringing this to the community @JorgeBarros , "Yoda" best !!