Summary

This project emphasized structure and documentation, focusing on file organization, consistency, naming conventions, and comprehensive documentation.

Objectives:

• Build a solar system model with realistic measurements and a distinguishable day-night cycle for Earth.
• Use Unreal Engine’s cinematic tools to create a presentable short video without causing motion sickness.

Goals:

• Adhere to common Unreal Engine naming conventions.
• Develop an accurate solar system, including realistic planet rotations, distances, and atmosphere colors.
• Enhance project practicality by creating master materials applicable to any planet, reducing the need for individual materials.

This approach ensured the project was well-structured, easily understandable, and efficiently managed, while producing a visually appealing and functional solar system model.

The Final Result

In this assignment, I created a scene featuring all celestial bodies with a nearly accurate representation, making some artistic adjustments for better readability and functionality.

Key achievements include:

• Materials: Developed master materials for planets and atmospheres, plus additional materials for the Sun, Jupiter's ring, and background stars. These materials were designed for easy editing through Material Instances, ensuring each planet behaves correctly.
• Naming Conventions and Structure: Followed Unreal Engine's recommended naming conventions for assets and imported files. I researched common Unreal Engine project structures and adopted widely accepted practices. Consistent naming conventions and clear project structure were maintained, with organized folders for each scene object.
• Code Organization: Grouped code into larger collections with additional smaller groups and comments to categorize and explain specific processes, facilitating easy troubleshooting and understanding for future users.
• Cinematic Setup: Organized relevant assets into properly named folders. Set up cameras and camera railings based on film industry techniques to ensure comfortable viewing. Used real-time recording for easy adjustments, implemented smooth camera movements and transitions, and organized the movie sequence with color coding and grouped folders for better readability and workflow management.

Overall, this project demonstrates my ability to create a structured, well-documented, and visually appealing scene using Unreal Engine, adhering to best practices and enhancing the user experience.

Material Design

Each material was built with numerous parameters, allowing for the easy creation of material instances with similar properties. This approach saves development time, as only the parameters need adjustment for new additions.

Planet Material Features:

• Day-Night Cycle: The planet material uses textures for both day and night cycles. These textures rotate in sync, with the material determining which texture to display based on pixel world position.
• Automatic Updates: The material automatically updates the day-night sides, allowing easy repositioning of planets without needing to recreate the material.

Editable Parameters:

• Rotation: Speed and direction for planet and clouds.
• Clouds: Color tint, texture swapping, deactivation, and transparency.
• Textures: Intensity and border size for day and night textures.

Other Materials:

• Sun: Adjustable light strength, speed and direction and surface color.
• Stars: Adjustable Intensity, stars speed & direction.
• Atmosphere: Adjustable Transparency and tint color.

These designs ensures flexibility and efficiency, allowing quick adjustments and consistent updates within the scene.

Lesson Learned - Color Theory

While working with materials and textures, I deepened my understanding of color theory and its practical application.

• Planet Atmospheres: Instead of strictly imitating documented colors, I applied color theory to determine appropriate atmospheric tints. This ensured a cohesive look, as     the planet textures weren't 100% accurate.
• Natural Flow: Blended colors from neighboring planets into each atmosphere for a more natural transition.
• Night Textures: Created night textures in Photoshop by cooling down day texture colors, ensuring a natural day-to-night transition. Additionally, used subtle tints from nearby planets to reflect their influence, enhancing readability and coherence in the scene.

Artistic Adjustments

To create a more readable and visually appealing solar system model, I made several artistic adjustments:

• Scaling: Used Earth as the main reference, scaling other planets proportionally to maintain relative sizes.
• Simplified Distances: Initially attempted a realistic model, but found the vast distances made the model difficult to read and manage. Working with large numbers was     impractical for this project.

Ultimately, I chose simplicity over absolute realism, prioritizing a cinematically pleasing and easily understandable model.