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Revamping The Dream Factory from scratch to give a more original style and to rework a lot of game mechanics.

007 Before rendering I needed to create the ocean floor. I started with a plane and displaced it with a noise. I was struggling for a good couple of hours trying to figure out how to get the plane to show through the environment fog. I tried adding a giant area light over the plane, at first it had very sharp edges so I added a black to white radial gradient into the opacity of the light which helps fade it blend into the environment more. This still didn't show any of the di

005 After getting some of the bg and start of shot 01 ready I started getting ready to animate the character. I did film myself and a friend of mine as reference footage. I tried setting 2 cameras up (1 for the front and 1 for the side as each shot is from a different perspective) so I could position the character up with the reference footage. I did start this very close to the hand in date but unfortunately wasn't able to start any of this work until now as I've had to work

003 After another meeting with my lecturer she suggested adding some lead to shot 002 to help better portray the speed of the ships. I had a new problem now though as there was a giant chunk of my material that isn't showing any of the effects like the roughness or displacement. It is as if the camera is clipping through the mesh but I tried everything with the scenes clipping, the camera clipping. nothing seemed to work so for now I am just going to have to lower the plane

001 Before starting any new scenes I waited to have a meeting with my lecturer, she suggested to keep refining the 2 shots I had already and get them ready to be signed off. I had been trying to acquire more/better assets than I already had, I had used a new version of starbreaker and exported it using the blender plugin. In blender the import worked perfectly, all of the materials and decals etc all worked fine. The only problem I had was the .glb export was still lacking a

After getting both renders done I opened them up and started to give them a quick grade as my friend Conrad was helping me make some sounds. I sent him the audio I got from Starbreaker of the ships engines and the interior sound as well and he added some effects on them and some other sounds like some beeps and wind etc. At the moment I'm having trouble with after effects as the extractor effect I need to use the multi pass exr is crashing as soon as I'm putting it on the foo

After rendering the first shot out (Shot-003) I think I might have enough time to render out the shot before it. I've used basically the same scene and duplicated one of the jets. I obviously turned the character models off because I want the windows to be fully reflective almost like a mirror. There were still a load of textures and mesh I needed to clean up like these thrusters on the top of the ship which were a very bright cyan colour which I just changed the material a b

I also tried messing around with the VDB's as I want more coverage but I also don't want to use up too much memory when rendering. I've been looking for something I used to use in Octane which would make it so objects are only showed if the camera can see it, which would help with optimisation. Unfortunately I was only able to find something to do with LOD's and I don't have any other LOD's of these VDB's. I did originally just hand place all of the VDB's but instead now I am

After getting the animation to a nice point I started to populate the scene a bit more. I added the planet in the sky which is going to be used later on to transition into the space shot. I've gone with the moon "Clio" which is the largest moon in Microtech. To create the texture for the moon I just got a image of the earth stretched out and just changed the hue of different things to get it the kind of turquoise colour of the moon. At first I was struggling to make it stand

When starting to animate I grabbed a few references online so I can get a feel of the kind of shaky movement that happens when going fast in jets/cars etc. I found a good one which also has some good reference of the pilot turning around and looking behind him which is perfect reference for a later shot as well (6:08 in the ref footage). Figure 1: Screenshot from Inside the F-35 Cockpit: Extreme Low-Level Valley Maneuvers (GoPro POV) (Aviation Wall, 2025) I started animating

I got the model of the pilot and got it into cinema 4d and sorted all the textures and replaced the big helmet with the smaller version of the helmet that looks more inline with a normal pilots helmet/visor that came with the model as the helmet I textured from StarBreaker didn't look that good and it clipped through a lot of the torso as the helmet is really long. I did notice though that there was a gap where the pilots face would be, I could just leave it as it is and it s

The armour was a lot more of a struggle to deal with than the ships as out of all of the helmets I tried most of them were completely unusable. I was able to find a couple that had all the mesh and all the textures but some of them were not usable as they wouldn't fit into the story like the vandul mask etc. I also had a big problem were all of the armour apart from the helmets would show up as a box, which is the box the armour turns into when you drop it on the ground. I ha

After adding some sounds to the pre-vis I wanted to go back to looking for different ways to extract/convert the star citizen assets. I found 2 discord servers that could help me with my problem. The first server I found was called "A Discord Server for Star Citizen Players to make Printable Files but not meet CIG Attorneys". There were a couple things I tried like a new software called "wwiser" which basically just did the same thing as the "Unp4k" software I used and wasnt

After rendering all of the pre-vis out I started to mess around with some sound effects. I added some flood light sound effect to the shot of the lights coming on of the ship underwater. I started looking for ship noises and then got kind of side tracked and got back to work on trying to extract and convert the game files so I could use the 3D objects/textures etc but most importantly I was thinking about the sounds from the game which I could use for the pre-vis and the fina

I have also added some rockets that just about make it to the main ship, shooting passed showing if the main ship hadn't jumped it would have destroyed it. I am kind of torn on the decision though as it would look really good but it also wouldn't make sense thinking of the games actual gameplay, as in the game you have to be pretty far away to shoot whilst locked on. Although I could add another shot that could look cool of one of the fighter jets divebombing down to align it

Next I added another new shot into the pre-vis. I added a POV shot of the pilot looking down at the water and seeing the targeting pick up the main characters ship as he had just turned his radar back on, I added this shot straight after the cockpit shot of the pilot looking to his side when hearing his ship make a noise to indicate the target had shown up on the radar. I've also changed a scene, adding some debris floating in the the water and some bubbles that would come up

Coming off the comments I had from my last module I started to get to work on some of the changes I needed to make. I'm going to start off by changing some of the pre-vis, adding some more motion to some of the cameras as some of them are locked off and could add more to some of the scenes with an animated camera. I'm also going to add some new scenes in to help with the continuity of the shots. I started off by colouring some of the main objects/characters/vehicles to help w

I wanted to start looking further at assets again as I've already spent so much time looking around for good models and also downloading different software's like StarFab (Spectrum, 2025) but not finding anything good. I found a couple different sources of different assets so far like the ships in my last blog post, but none of them at the moment are favourable because of different reasons like no texture maps, mesh not being segmented and low LOD etc. I think StarFab is goin

When it comes to assets I have already found a few sources for ship models from in-game which some guy had posted in a forum some years ago. I used one of the models in the storyboard/pre-vis but it was a really old model and didn't come with any texture maps or anything, I don't have much experience texturing big mesh's like this so I'd preferably want something that has textures that I can modify. The mesh was all one object as well so I think that would make it a lot more

Moving on to character design, I knew there wasn't much I wanted to change with the design of the character from the armour that's in game but I do want to add a couple things. Helmet For the helmet I want to use the Morozov SH-I Pyrotechnic variant as its an iconic helmet in the game and also has so very recognisable features which will help to make the main character stand out from the rest. Ithuraen (2025) Firstly I was thinking of expanding the visor so its a bit thicker,