In this week while I was waiting for the feedback from the lecturer of my progression of the animation work, I am meanwhile fix the texture of my characters and my sets.
For my characters, I adjusted the roughness of their clothes to make them looking less reflective in an unreasonable way, I built up the substance surface shader in unreal engine to make their skin become more transparent by absorbing the light.
Here is the tutorial I have watched to build up the character skin shader, to make it adjustable, I created material instance in Unreal Engine 5 to be playing around.
Beside in the imaginative scene, I have added niagaram particles to emphasize its dream like feeling, and below is the tutorial I have studied through the learning process:
In the first week of the final term, we have arranged the presentation to report the progression of our work over the summer holiday, and here is my PowerPoint below:
Since the holiday started, I have concentrated on finishing the character models and the set models in Zbrush &Maya, I retopologied models exported from Zbrush and assigned them flat UVs.
Due to the efficiency and the requirement of finishing a draft render version in September within the unit, I have started with a relatively simple pipeline by referring every file into my animation file. In case if I have enough time on October, I can polish and replace any of these models in the render software Unreal Engine 5.
Meanwhile, I set up scenes in Unreal Engine 5, which is matching to what’s happening in Maya, and every naked animation file is ready to be replaced by an updated one anytime to build up the convenience.
Beside, over the summer to make my animation working from blocking, a few references have been shot and edited with my supportive friends, and most of the poses are referring to the clip. As the previs was finished within the second term of the course, hence I was following the same camera movements for this final major project:
Before the feedback has been given by the lecturer I am currently focusing on the material/texture fix of my scene, as I want to emphasize movements of my character I try to keep the background colour pure and low-saturated. Which follows the principle of my case studies shown in the power-point and emphasize the emotion I want to deliver at the same time:
To consider, future weeks are still busy on polishing the animation work, I will be keep learning and improving my skills through the journey. And the video below is my recent draft render version, with my previs and the reference.
This week I have my final feedback session with the lecturer Nigel before I submit my work, and I have perused some resources which have been mentioned in the online journal I have read.
I have doble checked the way of citing an online journal without any date, and here is what I found in the UCL website:
In this intense term, I have learned a lot about the animation process. Started with taking the reference, to blocking and blocking plus of the shot, to the final splining and polishing of it, I have tried my best to make my work more reasonable and fluent. However, I still need to rely more on the principles and references instead of imagining of what’s happening in a scenario.
Here is my rendered final animation shots:
The process of producing an a animation shot:
The importance of shooting references and recording key poses:
12 principles of animation to follow & my notes:
The important of copied pairs and moving holds in blocking plus:
The order of polishing the shot after splining:
Always thinking of the curve/arc of the movement:
The important 4 components of the lip sync blockings:
In this week, I have adjusted some poses based on the feedback I received on the class and here is my progression:
At frame 1: I turned the head of the character slightly more to its left hand side, therefore audiences could see more detailed of his facial expression.
At frame 20: I added an anticipation before he’s turning his head.
When the line is being said by this character, I keep his mouth down to show his depression and keying the relative controllers.
At frame 98,: I try to keep his arm much closer to the audiences.
At frame 114: I try to keep the character straight when he is warning the little girl.
At frame 128: I try to keep the character’s left arm to hold in the position before he carries further movement by seeing the little girl touching the squirrel’s nut.
At frame 137: I gave the character a break-down pose to make his movement more smoothing.
At frame 142: I exaggerated the character’s reaction and making his face more emotional and worried.
To adjust the detailed shape of the lip, I tried to adjust more controllers at the same time, which helps to match the phonemes.
And for some lip shapes, I tried to exaggerated the shape to make them looking clear and more direct.
Here is my result of splining of this week’s work.
In this week I have done a short recording to demonstrate my simple game:
Overall, I think I accomplished more than I initially expected over the past eight weeks, and I really enjoyed exploring new features in Unreal Engine 5—especially the IK Retargeter, which allowed me to use my own model as a paragon character with seamless animations.
After I shared my demonstrating reel in Linkedin, I think people are more interested on the cultural heritage side of this game design:
It’s undeniable I put lots of effort on researching the architectural structure of the ‘quadrangle courtyard 四合院’, and how could the 3D side work in my game:
I also think that learning to build up the widget blueprint is like magic—it’s what makes a game run properly. I plan to continue improving my skills in this area during my free time, with the help of online tutorials and ChatGPT.
To talk about developing more of the project, I think I could possibly add more assets and elements to it, such as a haunted house and the ghosts which prevent the girl from reaching the treasure…
This week, I have worked on some details left over from this project, and I have figured out some issues that happened in the blueprint with the assistance of ChatGPT and online tutorials.
Fist, I have added a background soundtrack for the level:
I built up a widget for the opening menu by studying the tutorial below:
I used my model in Maya to bake a pose and then imported it into Unreal Engine 5 for rendering the cover of the menu:
I updated the UVs, texturing of the stone lion models and displayed them on the front of the architecture:
I noticed that the polycount widget also appeared in my main menu, so I added a few notes under the character blueprint to exclude it:
I also added an opening sequence of extreme long-shot animations to showcase the structure of the first level. Here’s the result:
