Final Major Project - Animating a Light Bulb

     For the small ritual room in my scene, I wanted to have a very particular type of lighting because I had a specific mood in mind that I wanted to establish. I wanted to have a hanging, blinking lightbulb - so in order to do that, I modeled an asset and applied a little swinging animation to it. 

Animating in 3Ds Max

    Animating in 3Ds Max is another thing that I learned how to do this year - and I found that it's much simpler than what I thought it would be. In order to animate an asset, all that you have to do model and then attach all the separate elements together. The reason we do this is because often times, when you animate an entire asset, if the separate pieces aren't attracted together, the animation doesn't quite work right. 

    Here, I would like to insert that attaching elements of the same object together might create some issues later on when it comes to texturing. For example, if you try to apply a material to your asset in Unreal Engine, it's not going to recognise the elements as separate unless you've assigned different materials to them prior to that in 3Ds Max, and it's going to apply the material to the whole asset.

    How we separate materials in 3Ds Max before exporting is easy though. 

    What we do is open Material Editor (and you can do that by simply pressing M), dragging out Standard Materials and dragging the standard materials onto the separate elements. Sometimes that won't work (because Max) and the way you can fix that is by dragging out a Multi Sub Material and connecting the Standard Materials to the Multi Sub Material. Then, in 3Ds Max, in the elements section, you only need to set up your IDs because they are what's going to make Unreal Engine recognise that your elements are separate and therefore need separate textures. 

Result

The Problem

Fixed

    What I would like to focus on next is populating my scene a little bit more in order to bring more life to it. Once again.. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 are the inspirations that I've been looking at, but also now that Elder Ring is out, I've been taking inspiration from that too because it has such a similar vibe to what I'm going for in terms of mood. Not in terms of textures though, as the style of From Software games is more realistic than what I'm going for. 

Examples

Inspiration screenshots that I took while watching videos from Elder Ring on YouTube.