Final Cornell Box
Idea
As I’ve always enjoyed visiting Japan and am interested in Japan’s rich culture, I thought of creating a Cornell Box that captures some of the elements of Japan I love. During my brainstorm process, I came up with the idea of bridging the indoors and outdoors of Japan such as creating a tatami room with Japan’s famous torii, bamboos, etc, and drew a quick sketch of my idea.
Reflection
Trying to combine various elements that represents Japanese culture, I collected pre-made assets from Sketchfab, imported them into Unreal Engine, then started placing them into my box. I had some issues with the materials of a few of the objects, and tried to replace the texture or material to the best of my ability as possible. After setting up the basic objects of what I had in my sketch above, I went with the flow and further add in additional elements related to Japanese culture that I thought of. During my working process, I also decided to elongate the depth of my box in order for me to set up a foreground area to my box, which ended up including the bridge, traditional lamps, and old trees.
Setting up the assets was a little time consuming, but the overall process went by fairly smooth. On the other hand, the animation took me a little while to figure out as I tried to get used to navigating and setting up the camera movement. I decided to use the bridge in the foreground as a lead, and set up the camera as if the viewer crosses the bridge and explore into the scene. My camera then focuses on the various Japanese culture themed objects in the back to present a close up view of each, then zoom out all together to show the entire content of my box. As I hope to create a cornell box with a calming feel and ambient mood, I only animated subtle movements to the bamboo, old trees, and hanging lanterns, and left the rest of the objects still. Overall, I feel that I learned a lot about 3D assets and game engine navigation through working on this project in Unreal Engine, and definitely hope to continue to mature my skills in the future.
Source and References
Background Music
Slow Motion — Royalty Free Music from Benson
Sketchfab Assets
Bamboo Tree — by tojamerlin; Japan Lamp Old Style — by maxence rouillet; Japan Tea Set — by juyo; Japanese Lamp — by rilanawelsing; Japanese Lamp Chochin — by jian milanese; Japanese Shrine Bridge — by leviwalker1999; Japanese Stone Lantern — by sahir varmani; Japanese Tea Table — by juyo; Japanese Temple — by galaxxxy; Japanese Torii Gate — by sahir virmani; Japanese Zabuton — by juyo; Ken Tourou — by mattetop; Kyoto Cityscene Props — by mikali karaca; Old Tree — by rodrigo gelmi; Shoji Screen — by juyo; Steampunk Ceiling Lamp — by daanwever123
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