Through the production of the final project, I gained more experience using special effects software like Unreal Engine 5, Maya, 3D Substance Painter, and Nuke X. At the same time, I also further explored my expertise and career direction in the field of VFX. At the beginning of my project, I researched Chinese Tang-era poetries and paintings. The story that happened in The Three Gorges I was planned to restore in Unreal Engine 5 and add some fantasy elements to the scene. For example, two giant statues of gods were planned to be added on both sides of the mountain gorge. And I will mainly use Unreal Engine 5 to restore such a fantastic journey of the poet. First of all, I learned and explored how to create a landscape in Unreal Engine, and after referring to a large number of China’s Three Gorges landforms and paintings from the same period, I had a certain understanding of the geography style in that area. I first built the landscape and mountains of the scene and used bridges to add grass, trees, and other vegetation to the scene. After that, I added rivers to the previously reserved valleys. In this way, I roughly completed the design of the scene’s terrain landscape. In the creation of this scene, I found that I have more experience and a strong interest in 3D environment design and creation. In the future, I will further deepen the exploration and research of 3D scene environment creation. After completing the overall mountain, river, and other environments, I began to design and plan the models needed in the scene. For some starring models, such as the boat, I will model them using Maya. For some bulk models on the docks and villages, I will use the model and material library like Bridge. For the statue models, I chose to use 3D scanning to create more realistic models for the two giant statues. At the same time, I will use the model resources in the Kitbash3D material library for the temples in the mountains. After organizing and creating all the material models, I designed the material maps of the model and texture of the model to a certain extent, while ensuring that the color tone of all material maps is consistent. After that, I imported all the models into the Unreal Engine 5 and designed the materials of the models. After ensuring that all the models had no errors and were well prepared, I imported them into the previously created scene. I first completed the construction of the village and dock. Then I created some smoke particles to make it feel inhabited, then I placed giant statues on both sides of the gorge, and then I placed the temple on top of some peaks and added some fog around the temple. After completing the construction of the model, I began to design animations for the movement of the boat and began to design camera shots based on the previously designed shot scripts. After ensuring that everything was as planned and accurate, I began to use movie render in Unreal Engine 5 to rendering, after the rendering was completed, I started the post-editing work, adjusting the color and adding the soundtrack. Through the production of this final project, I have a deeper understanding and application of the production of visual effects projects. At the same time, I have further deepened my knowledge of Unreal Engine 5. After this, I will continue to study Unreal Engine 5. And focus on more exploration of environment creation. The production of this project has a very strong guiding role in the choice of my career path, and I have a further understanding and more experience with visual special effects production.
