Realtime Rendering

My first foray into the 3D space was in my Concepts of Realtime Rendering class, crosslisted with the film department. I was taught by an Epic partnered tutor, Deepak Chetty. We learned the basics of using Unreal Engine for visual development and lighting design. Unreal is becoming popular as a tool for pre-visualisation, location scouting, and even for short film creation. I got a taste of those elements in this class, where I learned how to combine film techniques with technology to make my vision come to life.

Reference still from Blade Runner 2049

My recreation (the signage was all hand-built with geometry) in Unreal Engine

One of our assignments was to pull a reference still from a movie we liked and recreate it as accurately as possible in the engine. I really like vivid, contrasting lighting, so I chose a moody frame from Blade Runner 2049 to recreate. I hand-created most of the props in the scene to match the reference as perfectly as possible. In the case of the cityscape in the background, I had to use an emissive material with a texture on it to recreate the glow of the city.

For one of our final pieces, the theme was "abstraction" so I played around with reflections, textures, and lighting to create an unidentifiable but atmospheric scene. The large sphere in the background brings to mind the moon, and the shapes in front of it might be space debris, but largely I like the open-endedness of this piece.

Another final piece involved re-lighting an existing scene. At the time, one of my favourite games (What Remains of Edith Finch) had just released multiple spaces from the game for free, so I chose Molly's bedroom as my test case. These were the original lights in the scene - everything was quite flat and dull, besides also being hard to see.

My edits stripped out all the original lighting and played up the volumetric fog flooding in through the window. I also wanted to play with the contrast of warm and cool lighting as well as the shadows cast by the window frame, so I experimented with the strength of the light coming from outside vs. the light being emitted by the lamp.

My final still includes some particle effects to highlight the luminosity of the window, some rim lighting to highlight the rocking horse, added bloom and some chromatic abberation to provide depth, and lighting in the fishbowl!

I also completed a three-point lighting study using a character from Epic's unreleased game, Paragon, again playing with colours, highlights, and atmosphere. You can find a full write up of my realtime rendering final projects over on my Artstation!

↑Back to Top