This week I have focused on the progression of the UE5 assignment and its feedback session, I have finished most of its editing and will be start adding sound design in following weeks:
Within the project, I have built up the opening dream scene this week to indicate the robot’s ambition of being rich, I started working on the scene by modeling cash and coins in Maya and building up their texture in Substance painter:
I have used the reference photos to work on the icon of the money and through the re-topology it brings me a clean topology:
I have also tried to work on the icon in Zbrush, however, I found the result is not ideal and the model is too heavy:
As I was designing the own cash to appear in the robot’s dream, here is what I made and projected:
I prepared the animation of the money in Maya and imported it into UE5 through the baked FBX file and Alembic file separately. Due to the cash having a non-linear bend applied I learnt from the video below, that I couldn’t bake the deformer in to the game engine.
After I had imported everything into a new level of my project in UE5, I decided to give the robot a purple background to indicate its luxurious dream:
However, in the feedback session on Friday morning, my lecturer pointed out that the background built up in UE5 is too protruding therefore she wanted me to build up a proper box as a set, and also add some light spots to make audiences concentrate on the character more. I agreed with her idea, and said it should be more creative:
I used the low poly to work on this box by considering time limitations, due to the robot being a tattoo machine, I experimentally added a layer of skin texture and tattoos on top and related back to the fake skin in its room. To represent its dream and ambition are building up by its reality and ‘function’.
I key the colours and size of the spotlights & skylight in the dream animation sequence to ultimately achieve the desired effect. I keep the purple tone through the lighting:
I have also given the coins some added light through having another light channel 1, therefore they can be more shinning in front of the camera:
In the editing software Premiere Pro, I cut the dream scene with the reality scene at the beginning when the robot sleeps. And because it is a dream, I added an extra layer of effect on top to increase its blurriness and exposure by following an online tutorial below, to build up the dream-like feeling:
During editing, I have also cut off some problematic frames naturally happened in UE5 due to the light changing through shots or camera movement:
In addition, in this week I was also working on the 2D effect of tattoo done by the robot in this animation:
I worked on this specific shot in photoshop by combing the 2D layers with the video document:
I learnt the function from scratch through following this video below:
Overall it’s an intensive week for me, however I do enjoy the progression and always do my backup of files.