Category: Immersion (UE5)

In a near-future vision of Jaipur, Jaipur_2042 explores the consequences of unplanned urbanization—a cityscape where roads, bridges, metro lines, and commercial structures clash against the context of architectural heritage and nature. This short presents a jarring juxtaposition of the old and the new, an exaggeration of the rapid urban sprawl of Indian cities.

This is not to choose side of old or new, or disregard modernization. Jaipur_2042 calls for a harmonious coexistence, where development does not overshadow heritage and nature but finds a way to complement it. A world where the old and new can stand together, not in discord but in thoughtful juxtaposition.

At the center of the city lies a ruined fort, a silent witness to centuries of history, now engulfed by the relentless growth of the urban jungle. Neon lights and massive commercial billboards obscure the natural horizon, cutting off the flow of sunlight to the space. This chaotic cacophony of development poses a stark contrast to the timeless solitude of the fort. An AI droid, programmed to restore the fort, works on repairing the ancient structure. Resulting in an unintended side effect, the city begins to deconcstruct. Modern constructions go backwards in time, dissolving into the sands of time. Slowly, the chaotic cityscape fades away, leaving only the restored fort standing alone in the vast desert.

I wanted to present the contrast seen in above images between the heritage and Urbanization. Looking back at my time in Jaipur, the speed of development has increased with passing years. While imagining a version of the city nearly 30 years in the future, I came up with the idea for this short film. To recreate the Rajput Architecture, I refered to some elements from the existing forts and palaces.

Process

Working in Unreal Engine was new experience, both exciting and challenging. My knowledge of the production pipeline in blender was useful to translate into Unreal Engine. It was a quick process to visualize and blockout the shots in Unreal, with easy to setup cameras and sequencer.

After blocking out the scenes, I created different building assets in Blender, updating them simaltaneously in Unreal to see what looked better. Using 5-6 different types of buildings I managed to create the cityscape scene. The skylight and directional light worked well as I planned. I did the animations in Blender as well and imported them in Unreal, placing the character in different positions.

Challenges

The main issues I faced was to get the physics simulations right. With a number of physical property settings it was difficult to adjust and get a smoother fracture simulation. Another challenge was the post processing, I could not manage to get Depth of field in the shots. The color corrections did not work out as I wanted too.

This week we learned different lighting setups.

I experimented in class with different types of lights (spot, area, point). Using IES light functions, I managed to create dynamic moving lights with varying color and intensity.

For my project I used mainly skylight and emissive materials to light up the scenes. The city scape however required a few spot lights for lamps and some blinking lights on top of tall structures or construction cranes. I created a basic Light function to have a blinking effect for the point lights.

Understanfing Rigs and character animation in Unreal was a bit complicated. The Riging process was using node based coding which I could grasp, but keyframing the animation was time consuming.

I used Blender for my character rig and animations. For importing the animations, I imported the character model with rig first as an fbx. And then imported animations as separate actions to plugin on the character rig.

For my story, I needed broken building parts reconstituting into the original state. To get the right fracture amount, I tried multiple fracture seeds and setting until it was looking as needed. For creating further damage, I added 2 or 3 levels of fractures to some assets.

I used 2 different Chaos collections to record the fracture on the dome and wall parts. Recording and then keyframing the static pose time on the Chaos Cache managers, I managed to get the rebuilding animation in the sequencer.

This week was for learning material and texturing in Unreal. As having worked with node based materials in Blender, this was relatively easier for me to understand.

I created a master material. I added the following controls as parameters to modify for different instances-

• Texture Position, Rotation and Scale
• Albedo
• Specular
• Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Mettalic
• Normal
• Surface Imperfections
• Emission
• Textures

Using this master material, I created multiple instances changing the parameters and getting materials for different surfaces.

For this week, we worked on sequencers and cameras. Within my project file, I created cameras for the required shots and placed them in sequence of the script. Then animated the camera movements using transform keyframes on the sequencer and editing the graphs to get desired motion.

To break down the scenes, I created a main Sequencer and 3 Sub-sequences for each scene.

This is a draft export of the camera cuts from the main Level Sequence.

Within the subsequences, I added the character and levels that I wanted to be hidden. Each asset was coverted to spawnable and turned on or off where required. Below is a subsequence where I turned off the ‘City’ Level to have just the terrain and fort visible.

The first and second week we focused on installing and getting used to the interface of Unreal engine 5.4.

Unreal has an intuitive interface where basic navigation is done through LMB+WASD and QE. A project Outliner on the right and a Content Drawer at bottom to organize assets. And the properties panel of left bottom to edit those assets. The toolbar on top has different selection modes and options to add objects or levels into the project. Under that are the shading and viewing options, along with tools for translation and modification with options for snapping.

Having worked for films and in Blender, this is a good analogy for me to understand the workflow in Unreal.

Within the project there are Levels with Sub Levels within them which are like sets for a film. And

For my project, I started by creating folders for Environment Assets, Levels and Extras for Lights and cameras. I added a new Level to create a terrain for the scene. Then I added basic light setup using Env. Light Mixer.

Environment Lighting

My scene is set in a desert landscape, so I edited the env. light colors and added a custom stylized Cloud texture, to get the desired aesthetic for the environment.

Landscape Sculpt

Using the Landscape tool, I created a rough terrain to place my built mass and applied a sand material to the landscape mesh.

Blocking

Using the Modelling tool within Unreal, I created a blocking of the fort for the scene.