Internship Project

For my internship project I was asked to make a cinematic about a steam train and the engineer throwing coal into the furnace. Also, before doing that I had to paint it, I had to animate it and the engineer and then do the appropriate cinematic and visual effects.

The first activity I did was related to Autodesk 3DS Max was to remove geometry that was not needed in the locomotive. There was a lot and as the locomotive was very big I spent a lot of time removing everything that was not needed. With this I managed to go from about 800,000 polygons to about 150,000 polygons, which would help a lot to the performance and it was almost not noticeable in the modeling. Once I had it with the geometry I wanted, I had to change the normals of more than half of the locomotive because they were wrongly made. To do this I had to be exporting all the time to Unity to see how the normals looked like because in Autodesk 3DS Max always renders both sides. Once this problem was fixed it was time to extract UV's. And once the UV's were done it was time to start painting the locomotive with Adobe Substance Painter 3D. With all this done, the only thing left to do was to animate the locomotive, which I did with the joints system of Autodesk 3DS MAX. What they do is that you give to an object the position or rotation (or both) joint to another object, as if you were its child. And with this simple system rotating only one wheel you could animate all the wheels and the joints.

When I started with Adobe Substance Painter 3D the first thing I did was to paint the panels of the main tube of the locomotive, as it is the most important, the most visual and what is most visible and stands out. Then I gave a black color with a little roughness to the whole locomotive and from there I started to paint details. I painted all the tubes yellow to make them stand out and some other objects I painted white.

Besides painting, I also put on both sides company advertising (as if the locomotive was owned by the company) to give a better touch to the design.

Once finished with Adobe Substance Painter 3D we pass the model in FBX format and all the textures of the materials. The work we are going to do in Unity will be to create a cinematic where there is an engine driver throwing coal into the locomotive's furnace with a shovel. So to start with this, I put the FBX file of the locomotive inside Unity with its respective materials and textures created in Adobe Substance Painter 3D. I also took an image of train tracks from the internet and removed the background and left only the tracks, I also gave it a normal map to make them look more realistic.

Once the locomotive is already in Unity it's time to put the character. For this I downloaded a kind of worker from the Mixamo website. He was very colorful for the time so with my more advanced knowledge of Adobe Substance Painter 3D I put a lot of dirt on his body, because at that time the engine drivers were always dirty because of the coal. He was also wearing a reflective vest, so I had to fix his normals in Photoshop so he wouldn't shine so much. Also, he had a very modern cap and I had to change it for another one that looks older. Already with all this, I added a dirty shovel on the ground that is the one with which he has to pick up the coal, and I also put coal on the ground in front of the character that is the one that is going to throw into the oven of the locomotive.

I downloaded the animations for this character from Adobe's web page, Mixamo, and with a little research I found the animations that I needed to be able to make the cinematic. The animations I downloaded are idle, pick up with the hand, pick up with the shovel, throw with the shovel, turn right, turn left and open and close a door. In addition, I also animated the animation where the oven door opens and the projected light changes.

With all the models already placed in the Unity scene, now it's time to add some special effects. The first effect I created was the steam smoke effect coming out of the main chimney with Unity's VFX Graph. I also made the oven fire with its variables in case I need to add more particles to change the color or the life of the particles. These two are the main ones, but I also made other effects such as wind, oil and pressurized steam that expels the locomotive. I have also made an emissive light material to simulate the front light of a locomotive.

Now that everything related to the locomotive is ready, we need a good environment. In this case our boss advised us to “put it” inside a hemisphere with the bottom part almost flat and with the normal ones inverted to see it from the inside and not from the outside.

The last missing element was the sounds, which I got them from a web page that generated them with AI. This website usually has its function because sometimes there are sounds that you can't find and this website makes them without any problem. The only problem this website had was that it only let you generate two sounds per day if you didn't pay a subscription, so you had to go little by little and ask for the right sounds.

Finally, when we have all the assets we need to make the cinematic we start with it with Unity's Timeline tool. With this tool I had to synchronize everything I had to make sense of the cinematic, for example, when you put coal in the oven more smoke comes out of the chimney and the fire becomes brighter and more particles come out as well as making a burning sound. Also, it has a shovel on the floor that bends down to pick it up to pour the coal and on the other hand it also has that when the pressurized steam smoke comes out there is a decompression sound.

In addition to this cinematic I also made another one full of idle animations and turning right and left. I made this one for when the camera is far away to do this, so when you get closer the character would do the important thing and it would be more eye-catching for the player.