Inspiration

I’m going to team up with Xinran Li to build a traditional Song Dynasty Scene. Our inspiration is from Building Fan which was a famous building in Song Dynasty. This painting was done by Xiaoyou Zhang, and it was painted in 1994.

Reference

This is what the scene will be looking like generally. We will do a time lapse from day to night, and show how the lights will be lighted. To the front, we will have one main large building, and three or four smaller buildings around the main building. And in the back, we will have something like an entrance or a gate to this scene. And there will be one or two small pavillions that’s above water. There are boats floating on the water too.

The style of the buildings will be like this. Green rooftop, red columns and white walls.

Storyboard

Schedule

Rought Layout

I did a rought layout in Maya to show that what the scene may look like and where everything is supposed to be.

First Building Modeling

I’m responsible for the base of the building, and Xinran is responsible for the roof.

After I got the rough roof from Xinran, I put on top of the base building. But I found something is misssing, which is “dougong”.

Dougong plays an very important role in traditional Chinese Architecture. The function of dougong is to provide increased support for the horizontal beams that span the vertical columns, or pillars, by transferring the weight over a larger area of a beam into each column.

There are also different types of dougong in different dynasties. During the Tang and Song dynasties, dougong was mainly used as a building structure to support the weight of the roof without too much decorative effect. During the Ming Dynasty, innovation brought about the invention of new wooden components that aided dougong in supporting the roof. This allowed dougong to add a decorative element to buildings, exemplifying the traditional Chinese integration of artistry and function. Bracket sets became smaller and more numerous, and brackets could be hung under eaves, giving the appearance of graceful baskets of flowers while continuing to support the roof.

This video explains how dougong works.

I want to find a tutorial of a dougong that looks like the dougong in our references to build in Maya. I didn’t find any tutorials, but I found this video of making a small dougong model as an example. So I watched through this video to understand the structure and followed step by step.

I found this step is really interesting because I actually never paid attention to dougong when I visited the Forbidden City. It’s my first time to know about this. I also respect how traditonal Chinese people figured out this complicated achitecture stucture and how smart this is.

The roof was updated by Xinran with more details, now I need to think about how to connect the gap between the base building and the roof. In order to avoid the gap, I had to modify the top of the base building.

Pavilion

Firstly, I had no idea how to create this pavilion especially the roof. I watched through some tutorials and found this one.

I followed this video to start with bended plane as roof base. Then use lattice tool to shape it. Next is to created two tiles to get ready to create Mesh network for Chinese roof tiles.

And then he used the Create Mesh Network tool to duplicate both tiles along the roof base. He converted the edge of the base roof to a curve, and he extruded a square with the curve to create the edge border. Then he duplicate special to duplicate 5 more groups together to form this pavilion roof. Lastly, he finished up the top with CV Curve tool to draw the shape and extruded it.

I followed step by step and I found this is not I wanted. It looks like it is a pavilion roof but it’s not exactly correct, because the top of the roof is very narrow and small, and the direction of the tiles is also wrong.

This is a comparison of the wrong one and the correct one which was rebuilt by myself later. And you can see that the base roof is also not bended from top to bottom but left to right. So I decided to make a new one, but this tutorial did give me an inspiration of making the tiles.

The shape of the base roof is very important, it decides the general shape of the pavilion. I created the base roof very carefully. I did same steps in the beginning, duplicating the tiles with Creating Mesh Network tool.

And then duplicate special to get the rest parts. I extruded the edge border and bended it to make the tips up like in the image. Obviously, this is a pavilion with two layers roofs. I duplicated this roof to make another layer of roof. I noticed the tips are also layered one by one, and it looks like it’s cut half through. So I modified the tips to look like that as possible as I can.

I created a plane and inserted edge loops along the patterns, and then extuded out to get this decoration. Then, I duplicated them for the windows.

Rough Render

Main Building

I modified the first building that Xinran and I did before, and turned it into the large main building. The first thing I did is to changed the connection between roof and the building. This was a challenge for me because I was so confused about the structure around Dougong. I looked through lots of references and see how it exactaly is.

Then, I started to create the winow. There are so many different styles of the traditional Chinese window, so I just picked the one that I can understand the stucture easily. I saw this image, and found that it’s made of many squares, so I tried to create the patterns that’s shown in the image.

After I’ve done the first layer of the building, I duplicated it to create two more layers.

Rough Render

Progress In UE5

Xinran has started layout the scene in UE5, she imported everything into the scene and rendered out. The scene will be surround by mountains in the back and more buildings. There will be also more corridors and plants around the buildings. The boats and the buildings with materials in the back are downloaded from online.

Expectations

Plants

Finalizing the model

I added more details to the main building and the pavilion. Xinran built one piece of both the white and red fences and resembled by me. After I did all the UVs, I exported the model as FBX and imported into Substance Painter.

I added more details to the main building and the pavilion. Xinran built one piece of both the white and red fences and resembled by me. After I did all the UVs, I exported the model as FBX and imported into Substance Painter.

I added more details to the main building and the pavilion. Xinran built one piece of both the white and red fences and resembled by me. After I did all the UVs, I exported the model as FBX and imported into Substance Painter. I also modified the main building to another smaller building in the scene.

Corridor

I created 3 groups of the corridor, which are left, middle, and right. It’s easier for my teammate to organize and resemble a long corridor in UE5.

But soon we reallized a problem that we need a corner for this corridor, so I’m responsible for this part.

Progress in UE5

Compositing

For this shot, Xinran tried to add depth of field in camera in UE5 but it didn’t work really well, so I added depth of filed in Nuke. However, I know how to do it when the sequence is rendered in Arnold, I’ve never tried with Unreal Engine.

Then we found this perfect video which tells you how to render out the Z pass (the depth pass) in Unreal, and how to composite in Nuke.

Firstly, I shuffled the channel to get the depth pass. And then I used Zdefocus node to get the camera depth of field.

The edge got a bad result after I defocused it. So I rotoed the area to add another defocus to the edge.

I used the same way to add depth of field to each shots. Lastly, I edited and color corrected in Premier.

Final Video

My thoughts

I’ve learned a lot from this project, and I had a good time when I worked with Xinran. We figured out many problems together, and we learned how to find out the problem and solve the problem by ourselves. I’ve learned new tools and new software. It’s challenging for us to create such large scene for the first time, and especially using the new software Unreal Engine. We are creating something while learning. Xinran did the most part in Unreal Engine since my computer is not fast enough, so we learned to talk frequently to make sure everyone is happy with the idea. I found communication is the most important part in the teamwork. If there is not enough communication between everyone, there would be something wrong. And you should always tell your ideas, what you think if you are not happy with anything, or the problems you encounter. The best way to work more efficiently with other people is the communication.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565211030454?casa_token=czHNOBP0SnYAAAAA%3ARjuWdjX_BhvIm9-NBvuW9B8dsKpMTOr6wZ7pGmomR2YMofOktD3zSlHwDvgltNbScaWULIqdakqSHQ

The dominant issue with deepfakes, though, is not so much the act of image manipulation itself, but the potential of such manipulations to deceive or mislead viewers, and their uses by bad-faith actors for persona appropriation, political interference, and involuntary pornography.

 At the same time, it could be argued that the act of circulating a photographic or video replication of an individual’s face on someone else’s body, even playfully, if done without the individual’s permission, is never 100% ethically benign.

https://www.wittenberg.edu/sites/default/files/media/alcf-2019/Wahl.pdf

The ethical challenges of recreating deceased actors are potentially great and have not
been adequately addressed. A few examples of this potential include recreating actors and not
paying their estate, placing deceased actors in situations on film that they would not have been
comfortable with, and eventually, the possibility that actors can be essentially created in CGI and not based on any existing person. Once this technology becomes widely available, there would not be a need to hire actors

https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/2019/02/13/the-ethics-of-computer-generated-actors/

many films have used such CGI methods to digitally de-age actors with striking results (like those found in the Marvel films), or to create spectacular creatures without much physical reality (such as “Gollum” in The Lord of the Rings series).

I was thinking about something I wrote in the first term. I wrote about how the team finished the film in Fast and Furious 7. They replaced Paul’s head with CG head in the film, and underneath is Paul’s brother’s body. This VFX techique is definitely amazing and mind-blowing, but what if this has been used for some people who have bad intentions to do something against morality.

https://www.respeecher.com/blog/de-aging-technology-changing-hollywood-future-film-making

In this article, the author talks about how the De-aging technology is destroying the films. They used the CG technique to replace the actor’s face or make them look younger, and tranfer the actor’s to the new charactor. What if they become ‘eternal actor’, then the deseased actors can stay on screen forever. He also mentions that everyone can become an actor in the future , which causes ethical questions.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/rise-deepfake-tom-cruise-tiktok

Anther article that I found talks about the deep fake. The author also mentions that the issues of ethical and the challenge to the law. So I believe that the CG face replcement or the deep fake is becoming a common issue on ethical and copyrights.