UE4: Lighting mini-blinds

Mini-blinds with lined shadows

Objects in scene are painted with the shadows
from the light function

Blueprint class with plane object and lights built in.
contains a non-shadowing point light, and shadow casting spotlight
which has the light function defined.

 

The blinds photo is added and set to give emissive light,
there is also a normal map I was testing, more useful when
not emitting light.

The spotlight near the blinds has a special material
 added as a "light function". This makes the lines masked out.

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.

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.

Sound Library: Noise Bin

 This archive contains noise. The sound of silence, depending on the medium recording it. Many different flavors of noise: from cassette, digital, vhs, film, tape reel, air recording, or empty space.

Download: Noise Bin

Patterns Gallery

 This gallery contains photographs of found patterns. They are original photos, I cannot give any license for the designer of the original pattern, if any.

Pattern Gallery

Texture Reference Gallery

This gallery contains photos of various textures: Nature, Fabric, Stone, Metal...

Photo Textures Gallery

Original textures captures from the world. Feel free to cut them apart and use them in projects. Please let me know if you find them useful or make something cool out of it.

Cliffords Piano: Virtual Instrument

 The second version of Clifford's piano, has been recorded. You can now download the updated Bitwig sampler preset. Kontakt and TX16Wx.

You may download the instruments here or support my creations on Gum Road: Purchase on Gum Road

The Bitwig preset has some extra FX for reverb and distortion. In this instance, the "tool" is plugged in there because I forgot to swap the L/R channels for low and high keys. As shown in the picture, the "right mic" is picking up the lower keys. when played, the low keys appear from the wrong side. For Kontakt, the channels are properly oriented. Edits were done in Reaper, sliced and rendered by regions.

Microphone setup within the piano

 Download: Bitwig Sampler Preset

Bitwig Multisampler & Device Macros: 
The sampler low-pass is controlled by velocity
 to give a lower tone on soft keypresses.
This compensates for the lack of many velocity layers.

 Download: Kontakt Instrument

Waveform trimming in Reaper to Kontakt sampler.
This instrument has a low-pass also modulated with velocity.
I've been studying the KSP scripting to get a basic interface
for a few FX, but that part is not quite ready.