Saturday, April 24, 2021

Virtual Art Gallery: Props and Pawns

 Details about the functionality:

The player pawn is for walking around and looking at things. It contains actions for moving forwards backwards and sideways using the keyboard, and looking around with mouse.

The pawn is set up as a "character" with character movement. There is a spring arm with camera, but currently the distance is zero, so it functions as a first person view. I also added some optional actions for mouse right click to zoom in, and left shift crouches down and back up; both using a timeline.

I decided to try using a "cinematic camera" for the player view, and see what features make it unique. It has lots of settings to tweak the image quality, lenses, and focus. In this case I made a simple autofocus for fading things that are outside the center area. 

Autofocus triggers on the tick, set at 1 second intervals

There are posed people set up around for scale and atmosphere, but they can be an obstruction. To resolve this, I built a blueprint that can fade the people in or out when the player is near.

blueprint with capsule collision. material instance parameter
faded in and out with a timeline.


Dither fade and remove collision when overlapped


added dither parameter to master material

Props:
Herman Miller inspired bent plywood desk



Work desk inspired by Herman Miller vintage office

Small workspace


Modular sofa set. showing detailed fabric material

master material: Reused the canvas pattern and normal maps.
starts with a color, blends with pattern, mixes in 2 bump textures.


Sunday, April 18, 2021

Virtual Art Gallery 3

 

Beginning layout of virtual art gallery built in Unreal Engine. Currently contains some of my own art in frames. Here are a few photos showing work in progress.

Partitions and lightboxes modeled in Blender
Furniture and lamps were imported from libraries.

Framing and work area. created original floor texture.
Modeled a few quick furniture inspired by Herman Miller.

People for scale, from the "scanned people" library.

framed art attached to prefab partition, decals


Version 3 - UPDATE:
New framed artwork, expanded layout. Many original elements were able to be converted to an Unreal 5 project. A lot of new artwork has been added, to supplement my paintings and drawings. Currently there is no ceiling, expecting to be replaced with a drop ceiling with big fluorescent boxes.

Framing Area

Lounge Area

I was concerned how I was going to pack every inch of this gallery with original, beautiful artwork. I have quite a few nice photos, drawings and paintings, but the collection needs to be much more diverse and engaging. Using AI generated art elements I can make an unlimited number of interesting pieces extremely quickly. Many of the colorful framed works are AI generated from text prompts using "Wombo Dream" web app. 

Overview

Lightbox has emissive material
gives a nice glow.

New area with pillars.

corner area with seating


Storage racks, mostly empty at the moment.


partitions. employee workspace.

the gallery owners desk. not quite enough clutter,
needs more bills envelopes and magazines,
piles of printed out emails. From this angle
you can see the pen and ruler are merged
in a very unrealistic way. will fix.