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brianh41419584
Participating Frequently
March 20, 2024
Question

What 3D assets to use for 3D waterfall environment as set extension? Model? HDRI?

  • March 20, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 346 views

Hi, new to Blender, Unreal Engine, and AE and still trying to figure out what work I should do in which program.  Spent past month non stop learning camera solving and Blender, and a little bit about AE compositing. Feeling overwhelmed. I am solo artist (guitarist first) trying to use VFX in a music video. I want to have myself filmed and integrated into 3D scenes.

 

One scene I have in mind is this:

 

I am in my hallway at home. I open a door and see a waterfall falling below, and also see off in the distance (mountains maybe). In this case I need good detail of top of waterfall and its immedaite surrounding.

 

Then camera view wide shot from the waterfall environment of me in my doorway. For this shot since it is wide, I don’t need super detail. But since camera will be doing a push in towards me (though it will never get that close), I need the camera move in 3D space.

 

At this point I know how to in Blender 1) perform camera solve, orient, set origin, set reference solids (in AE also kow how to do this); 2) build out original scene geometry of my hallway; 3) obtain keyed footage of myself

 

Now I am trying to figure out how to build these sorts of scenes and at what point it is time to work in AE. That is - where does the handoff occur?  I have read about HDRIs, megascans, full 3D models, kitbashing. Not sure where to start, especially doing all this solo and as a beginner. I have found 3D animated models of waterfall environments, but they are 5 million+ vertices and my computer will not handle that well, or I suppose there are methods to handle it in Blender or UE? That is, tell Blender where in the scene high detail is not needed?

 

Or maybe I don't need to do any of this scene work in Blender and just treat it as compositing in AE? If so, is there tutorial on something similar?

 

Also learning compositing in Blender, but seems I have to solve this problem of building the scene before I seriously think about compositing…

 

How would you experienced artists go about this (in AE or otherwise?)

At the moment I have i7-6700k computer with AMD 480X that is working in Blender using the ZUDA build. But that is of course still very underpowered computer. In about a month I will be building an i9-13900k system with 4090 or similar.

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2 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
March 21, 2024

Make sure you have your room cleaned up to facilitate masking (and because your mom told you). 🙂 If it's an option, use a  wider camera angle to have some "meat" to crop away later. The hadoff shouldn't be difficult since it's all straight walls and easy enough to generate a matching scene.

 

Mylenium

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
March 20, 2024

Waterfalls can be as trivial as Fractal Noise textures mapped to a bent plane or simplified particle systems using sprites. I'm sure there's enough of that to find on the Unreal Marketplace and if I'm not misremembering completely there's a bunch of demo scenes for some of these things in the asset browser. Likewise, the scene complexity would be of limited relevance. There's a gazillion ways to optimize a scene in UE using LOD (or just brute force it in UE 5) and even Blender has enough tools to create LOD and optimze meshes. You just need to spend the time and of course weigh the options. A lot of perceived "detail" is just texture maps, anyway. A good normal map, a matching color texture and some parametric displacement can make even simple spheres look like complex rocks. For the "handoff" there are no fixed rules. You use whatever works best in a given situation. The most critical factor in the scenario you describe would be achieving a stable camera solve and being able to transfer it across all applications. Whether that's going from AE to Blender or Cinema 4D or the other way around shouldn't matter, it just needs to look the same everywhere. The rest is best ignored. Unless you plan to invoke Nuke, Fusion or other 3D-ish compositing tools there is no point in transferring geometry, HDRI info, point clouds or what have you. You would only do so if you need to do projection mapping for set extensions or want interactive relighting inside your compositing tool. And as a quite general observation from someone who did 3D already 30 years ago: This stuff is overrated, anyway. A lot can be done with just matching lighting by eye without resorting to HDRI images and similarly it is often just as easy to re-render a new version of your 3D scene rather than getting bogged down in complex data transfers, terabytes of multipass rendering and endless futzing around in compositing. People are just spoiled by having too many options these days and use them without thinking just because soem crappy YouTube tutorial or a course on one of those overpriced digital schools told them so.

 

Mylenium

B
brianh41419584Author
Participating Frequently
March 20, 2024

In am starting to suspect as much!  Yeah, I believe I can get a lot done just compositing something, not worrying about actual 3D models.

 

Here is concept:

 

https://youtu.be/iZqu40_LMXE

 

I first open door of my studio and exit. Then open door to other room on left.  That is from where I want to see the waterfall landscape - its backdrop (maybe mountains), thne when camera pans down seeing the cascading waterfall.  I did basic camera solve here, when I do this for real it will be more accurate as lighting will be better and I will be using decent markers.  But this sort of shows the idea.  Next scene would be camera animation with camera over the waterfall landscape seeing me from wide angle and pulling in, though it will remain wide shot.  

 

Thanks for the ideas!

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