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Saturnity

Saturnity

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Hi everyone. Been a minute. I am so glad to finally be able to show what I got to do! Stopped working on the Career system and took a step away from gaming to work on it, took like 60 total hours after I tallied it up. Probably sounds like a bit much.. especially for the end product, but bear with me.

This was what I was working on as a "project" for a possible employer.

Going into it, I had just about zero knowledge of Unreal Engine, and a very tiny amount of knowledge from highschool about Blender almost a decade ago. Everything was completely new to me, but I found that I absolutely love level design, and Unreal Engine as a whole. I used some public assets, but a lot of the overall pieces were still crafted by yours truly.

The entire time it was learning and doing as I go, going down forum rabbit holes and sketchy UE5 tutorials I can barely understand. Not to mention, a C++ compiling error broke the project for like three straight days, took 6-8 hours each of those 3 days to fix it, as it was a very weird issue that go figure, no one else has ever seemed to have, so there was no forum to check, and after posting I got zero help. Fortunately, figured it out through trial and error, and even posted a small github for anyone else that may run into the same dumb issue..

I wanted some input, and of course to feel like a special little fella. I don't really have much to compare it to, other than work from people that have used UE5/UE4 for years.



It's a bit goofy and silly, but it was a fun process.
 
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Saturnity said:
Hi everyone. Been a minute. I am so glad to finally be able to show what I got to do! Stopped working on the Career system and took a step away from gaming to work on it, took like 60 total hours after I tallied it up. Probably sounds like a bit much.. especially for the end product, but bear with me.

This was what I was working on as a "project" for a possible employer.

Going into it, I had just about zero knowledge of Unreal Engine, and a very tiny amount of knowledge from highschool about Blender almost a decade ago. Everything was completely new to me, but I found that I absolutely love level design, and Unreal Engine as a whole. I used some public assets, but a lot of the overall pieces were still crafted by yours truly.

The entire time it was learning and doing as I go, going down forum rabbit holes and sketchy UE5 tutorials I can barely understand. Not to mention, a C++ compiling error broke the project for like three straight days, took 6-8 hours each of those 3 days to fix it, as it was a very weird issue that go figure, no one else has ever seemed to have, so there was no forum to check, and after posting I got zero help. Fortunately, figured it out through trial and error, and even posted a small github for anyone else that may run into the same dumb issue..

I wanted some input, and of course to feel like a special little fella. I don't really have much to compare it to, other than work from people that have used UE5/UE4 for years.



It's a bit goofy and silly, but it was a fun process.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing your creation - going through this entire animation and comparing it to what you shared originally when developing the environment, it's amazing how much you put into it.
There's some obvious jank to the movements and camera work. But it's a damn cool project and I'm so glad to see how far it came from where it started. And the fact that you had fun makes it all the better <3
 
This reminds me of these that randomly came up on my YT homepage, very cool

 
Siddo said:
Thanks for sharing your creation - going through this entire animation and comparing it to what you shared originally when developing the environment, it's amazing how much you put into it.
There's some obvious jank to the movements and camera work. But it's a damn cool project and I'm so glad to see how far it came from where it started. And the fact that you had fun makes it all the better <3
Click to expand...
Thank you! It was for sure interesting. It was janky for sure, but I gave myself some leeway since I had like no clue what I was doing to a large extent heh. There were probably things I did that could have been done WAY more efficiently. I recorded EVERYTHING I did, it would be funny to hand the raw files over to someone with good UE5 experience and see what they think haha. But, it's like 60gb of raw footage-


sorry, this might be long
For further context for people;
If anything, a LOT got messed up in the end. BAD. The entire pacing of the render is completely off from the original.

I didn't even mention how with UE5 you can either export as an actual video, OR as EXR, where it renders each frame individually one by one. My computer somewhat freaked out when I tried to render the video, and I found out using EXR is a lot easier and keeps the details crisp, keeps HDR.

Cue a folder of almost 13,000 individual photos. Had to use DaVinci Resolve to compile, it's great at it but I am not sure if people know but DaVinci is what like high budget movie studios use, so I am like a child who rode a big wheel then dad gave him keys to a Ferrari.

Well, the problem DaVinci has is that the timeline has a set framerate, but the playback also has a framerate, and they by default don't match(?) The original render was 60FPS, but DaVinci was set to 24fps, and the viewport IN DaVinci was set to 60fps.. well, I did all the sound in post... but I lined the sound up with the 24fps timeline, and the 60fps viewport, so TLDR the timing was completely screwed up. Bad.

Due to this mismatch, sounds were completely broken. DaVinci is very sensitive with the framerates, and you would think sound would be pretty universal since it's noise.. a noise that doesn't have a framerate. Some sounds worked perfectly fine, some were weirdly crackling and popping. Like, the noise timing was perfectly fine, the sound was at 'real-time' but would crackle like crazy. This was on the LAST day of my deadline, wasn't super important to stick to it but yknow, I wanted to. You can change the "fps" of the sound, but then you're changing the entire sound and making it quicker/slower, somehow based off FPS. "I can see sounds" ass editing. Again, what made it worse was the fact some sounds were perfectly fine, some sounds were crackling. Like, there was nothing different about them. I was thinking "Maybe it's a format thing?" or "Maybe I did something wrong in audacity?" Etc etc etc. Nope, just picky.

Again, with framerates being mismatched, even when I set the framerate of everything to 60, the video was not playing right. Mind you, the original EXR export was 60FPS! Still wasn't working. Sounds and the speed were all buggy, and by this point I already did SO much editing. Sound was the last aspect.

At this point, I don't even remember what I did to finally make it work, but I did, somewhat. It at least came out looking somewhat normal. Never using DaVinci Resolve ever again, most likely. The original pacing was a bit better, and had some stuff to kinda keep it a bit less clunky, but I kind of had to just get some tape and get it at least working and close to what I wanted.


BUT GOOD NEWS

I am now an official newly hired employee of Prismatic Interactive! They liked the video! My technical role is Level Designer, but will probably shift around a bit to help out where needed. Everyone is super nice and it reminds me a lot of everyone here, they very much have a focus on everyone being comfortable, and feeling like a group of friends working on something they love. Super excited to get to work with everybody. Such a great group of people from numerous backgrounds.

They have game nights sometimes, maybe at some point I can get people to come play GL :)

Can't talk about the what, but I can't wait for the project to release. I absolutely love the story and concepts.

If you want to stay tuned overtime, the site is here!
 
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