I was going to start animating the camera directly this week, but when I had the camera at some specific angles, I didn’t put any models inside the store by the station, which looked very abrupt, so I had to make cubemap for those places first.
Cubemap is a very simple principle, and is often used in game production to save resources; Cubemap expands the HDR map into six sides: top, bottom, left, right, top, and bottom, and then places the maps in different locations in the correct box. The Unreal Engine has its own specifications for how different parts of the map should be applied, so I looked up the article in the Unreal documentation here: Creating Cubemaps | Unreal Engine Documentation.
Things become more easier when I found this guide. So I searched a interior HDR map which looks like in a restaurant or a lounge. And I also searched the github there is a website I can upload my HDR map it could directly divide into 6 parts by order. https://jaxry.github.io/panorama-to-cubemap/
Then I just follow the guide in Unreal Engine, put these different image by the right order in PS. One thing need to be mentioned, when this kind of cubemap be exported out of PS, you must have a Nvida texture Tools plug-in. The only way to ensure that the output format channel bits are displayed correctly in Unreal Engine is to use this plugin. And change the format into 32bits/Channel, 8.8.8.8 ARGB 32 bpp, unsigned.
Drag the cubemap into Unreal Engine and create a shader for that. There is a node in the Unreal Engine’s material system specifically for this kind of cubemap, because you will get an error if you connect the cubemap directly to basecolor or emisiive. Search the node ‘InteriorCubemap’ and link the UVW to cubemap’s UVs, it could be appeared correctly. And I also add another two-digit parameter node to the ‘InteriorCubemap’ node’s tiling to contraol how much size of this cubemap in assets.
About the sequence animation, cause I spent most of time of learn the new work flow so I could only shot some scene animation. I chose several angles about the human and did some simple movement. Also I added some rain effect by blueprint, these rain effects nicely enhance the sense of atmosphere.