Last minute Lantern

Hello everyone!!

Welcome back if you've read my past two blogs on the making of a small diorama.

If you haven't they're called Gone Fishing and What's up Dock?

I apologise, but that's just my poor sense of humour coming out in these titles. I am simply beyond help in that department.

To quickly sum up what you've missed for the newcomers....

This is a short write up of how I made a diorama using 3 models during my time at university. This was the first time I was allowed to pick the topic and instead of going for mini robots or Viking armour like some of my classmates did, I chose to make a scene that was simple but effective. A dock with a parked up boat and a lantern. This diorama earned me the grades I was hoping for.

I have written about how the boat was quirky and why it stands out for me as one of my favourite models. I then went on to share my thought process when making the dock - Why I chose to add rope barriers and how I made water splashes on the walkway textures.

If you'd like to read more on those topics, please feel free to head over and take a look at those when you get a minute.

How I made the Lantern

I took a look at handheld oil and candle lit lanterns. Which is the same design that most electric lanterns have copied.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Anyway, I drew a couple of designs with the time I had left. One for an oil lamp and another for a candle.

I took the sketch above into Maya and started to use it as a guide. I know the image doesn't look like much and I didn't know at the time how well this would work as a template for what I was about to create.

Before I continue, I can already hear screams over this topology. I did go back and fix it.

Using what was in a 2D plane, I apply the diameter to a cylindrical shape and then smooth the shapes out. As you can see in the sketch, I used a small dome to work as a candle holder and then I put a cylinder to work as a candle. My reasoning for this was that I would be able to use the top of a candle to be a pinpoint later for my light source. Then it would be a matter of playing around with the light's tint to give an amber glow.

Next, I couldn't leave the candle open to the elements. So I bottled it behind what is going to be the glass casing. The reason it looks a bit blocky is because I chose to manipulate each edge loop manually to try and match my sketch. Things are usually clearer in hindsight. This is no different, I would definitely change the way I made the handles and I would use NURBS to make the glass surrounding the candle.

Anyway, After modelling the lantern, it's time to acknowledge that I don't talk about UVs when I write a blog post and jump straight to the fun stuff...

Texturing

So to texture this model, I chose to make a 1k texture as I was using a laptop at the time. I think I'll explain the relevance of my laptop another time, but for the sake of context I thought this laptop of mine would crash and burn if I did anything complex.

Using Substance Painter, I would typically use a "PBR Metallic Roughness" setup. Given that I needed glass for this project, I wanted to make sure I had an Alpha map. Once I sorted this, I baked the model and went for a painted metal texture for a base. I changed the colour of the lantern to red, this was because I saw it as a contrast to the blue I used on the boat. I made sure that this was a darker red as I saw a possibility that the light source I would apply in Unreal Engine 5 could burn or lighten the lantern textures.

Once I had established this, I could then go over and rust and dirt layers to show the lantern's age. I didn't apply any water splashes like I had done with the dock because I thought that, for the sake of a bit of light storytelling, the lantern would have only just been placed.

I gave the candle a waxy feel to it and a couple of smudges to show that the candle was being worn away to anyone that would examine it closely. I knew that this wouldn't be a key focus, so I didn't put too much detail into it.

For the glass, I set the opacity to around 0.3 and reduced the roughness to 0. This made for a shiny glass look. Given that the light would be a warm amber colour, I chose to set the base colour for the glass to be an orange. I looked at lighting a scene professionally in my final year and found that I had accidentally done this somewhat right in this scene. Lighting begins with your textures, thinking about how the material will look and react under a certain light. All that remained was a secondary colour to make the model stand out. I chose to make the rings that go around the glass a golden colour, this would work to prevent the shape from casting a shadow and make a real change from the wooden surrounding in the diorama.

Now the was complete, I needed to import it to the Unreal Engine and pop in a light so it actually works.

I keep thinking back to a post I saw about how a light in a game is run off electricity from you computer, so it's similar to how electricity runs to power an actual lightbulb. So if I'm running an in-game lantern using a laptop, then wouldn't that make it a battery powered lantern?

I thought I'd share that and let you question my sanity for a moment longer.

To light the lantern, I used a spotlight and changed the hue of the light source to match the feel of the scene I was constructing.

Please don't get critical for the quality of work done here, this was the first attempt at making any sort of scene. Before this point, I had only been creating 3D assets using the workflow that I have laid out for you above. The below scene is Diorama Dock. I sculpted the environment and used an asset pack to borrow the water and grass textures.

Thanks for reading this far, I really do appreciate it.

Feel free to look at another blog post or even explore some of my works.