Motion Design - “Stay With Me” 4

This is the final part of my work for the “Stay with Me” motion design project. This has been a great opportunity to put a full motion piece together in just 4 weeks, and to experiment with techniques and software to identify my knowledge gaps. I’ll be going over my final steps, including patterning, scene dressing, and lighting.

Substance Painter Patterns

I always wanted to introduce variation of pattern into the textures of the umbrellas. I was inspired by the traditional textile patterns of Japan, like Shippo and Seigaiha. Because these patterns can be easily isolated into their smaller parts, this was a simple job for Substance Designer and the Tile Sampler node. Each of the different patterns (5 total) were assigned to a single material for the canopy. These is controlled by a switch parameter that allows each instance of the Umbrella Person actor blueprint to have a changeable pattern in the viewport.

Cycle of available patterns

Animation

For the animation of the neon sign, nothing really had to be done beyond what I did last week. It is effectively just a parameter keyed to switch the material between a highly emissive glow and a simple glass. For the people, there are three rows, and each row has a different animation that goes to the music. The front row does the umbrella retraction animation cycle I showed in the previous blogpost. The second row rotates their umbrellas to and fro to the music. The third row goes under the awning of the main building, so as they move under, they bring their umbrellas down. All together this motion really makes the scene feel alive, and is similar to the hustle and bustle of a normal city crossing.

Lighting

Lighting has always been one of my weaker skills. Initially coming from the world of pre-rendering films, my experience was with Maya lighting. Even then I wasn’t the most proficient, since I don’t come from a photography or film background. But with Unreal Engine 5 there is the extra layer of managing the many systems that come with real-time lighting. I also never used Unreal Engine 4, so I’ve been having to wrestle with the basics while navigating the new Nanite and Lumen workflows. My next project is going to be to deep dive into practicing lighting. Whenever I finish an asset that is ready for portfolio showcase, I end up fighting against systems I don’t understand and my finished work doesn’t shine as well as it could.

All that being said, for this project I settled for super simple lighting. With a directional light to simulate the sun, I adjusted it to give a diffuse, cloudy day look that ties in with everyone carrying an umbrella. I added a rectangular light to the interior of the main fruit shop, but the raytracing did a good enough job illuminating most of the scene. The final light is the emissive neon tubes, but this comes for free with simple settings on the static mesh.

Pulled out view of the scene setup

With that, it’s time to move on to the next project! This has been a fun experience, and usually between big projects like this I like to tackle subjects I am weak on or develop some tools to speed up my process next time.

Thanks for reading!