Oblivia VJ Clips & Tutorial

The Oblivia VJ clips set was created from a 3D printing model, some further pillar modeling in Cinema 4D, and a box with a hole in Unreal Engine.

The 3D printing statue was created by Calum, a talented artist who creates and sells 3D printed statues and printing files. You can find more of his art on his website. Yes, that means you could have a physical statue of Oblivia delivered to you.

I discovered Calum’s art on CGTrader, where his Ancient Panelled Lady immediately captured my imagination. I envisioned it being huge, suspended in mid-air inside a dark chamber, with light rays illuminating it from above. Human-sized stairs, appearing tiny, led inside and disappeared into the distance behind it. Everything was very foggy and mysterious. Suddenly, in the midst of it all, the statue began emitting lights in different patterns, as if it were an ancient relic forgotten by everyone, only to be rediscovered and brought back to life.

After chatting with Calum and explaining that I wanted to turn his creation into VJ clips, I obtained his permission and the necessary assets. I started by preparing the asset for Unreal Engine. Since it was originally designed for 3D printing, it had a high polygon density. In Cinema 4D, I used the Remesh tool to reduce the density and convert the mesh into triangles, as Unreal Engine uses triangles instead of quads. (I initially attempted to skip this stage and reduce the density directly in UE using “——,” but the result looked too distorted to work with.)

In Unreal Engine, I began by blocking the scene for a rough composition. I created a box to serve as a large hall and used a couple of cylinders as pillars. I wanted Oblivia to appear enormous in the scene, so I added Manny, UE’s default mannequin, as a reference for human scale. I arranged the primitive pillars on both sides of Oblivia and added stairs leading away from it. By adding a spotlight from above and increasing the volumetric fog, my vision started to materialize before my eyes. I was in awe.

Since UE 5 introduced modeling tools, I decided to try them out and potentially create everything within the engine, eliminating the need for back-and-forth modeling and importing. I created a hole in the box that formed the hall using another cylinder and a boolean tool, which worked well. I then attempted to model the pillars using boolean operations and subdivisions but soon realized that modeling was not my strong suit. Additionally, I wasn’t certain about the desired appearance of the pillars, which further hindered the outcome. Eventually, I gave up and searched for pillar references that would suit the scene. After finding suitable references, I used the Lathe object in Cinema 4D to transform the splines I drew into simple and beautiful pillars. In retrospect, I realize that I overcomplicated things by trying to make the pillars resemble Oblivia, which diverted attention away from Oblivia itself.

With my new elegant and simple pillars, the scene looked much better. My next task was to make parts of Oblivia emit light. Again, I wanted to accomplish this within the engine, and after watching some tutorials, I discovered that I could paint directly on Oblivia using the Mesh Paint tool, which paints directly on the vertices. I had to create a material that used the Vertex node to ensure that my vertex paint would appear on Oblivia’s mesh.

I meticulously painted Oblivia using three colors: red, green, and blue, ensuring a balance between them so that each time a different color lit up, it would have a significant impact.

Once Oblivia was painted, I proceeded to create the VJ clips. For each clip, I designed a sequence in which I animated the lights (light-reveal clips) or the cameras (fly-by clip).

Due to the substantial volumetric fog in the scene, I encountered a significant amount of noise in my renders. After researching noise reduction techniques, I decided to purchase DaVinci Resolve Studio and used it to clean up the renders, which worked like magic. I highly recommend using it to reduce noise or even render with fewer samples (shorter renders) and then clean them up in post-production.