Category: immersion

In this week’s session, we have overviewed some fundamental things in UE5. Started by creating a new project and building up fundamental lighting through an environment lighting mixer as shown below.

While building up the light, we have been taught that pressing control + L and then holding the control bottom is the way to directly set the sunlight direction.

After the lighting, we opened the material. The material panel has different nodes, mainly we use constant to build up the colour and other passes.

As we want to import some models into the workshop, the quixel bridge in the engine is a quick way to grab them with existing materials.

While we were playing with models, we were taught that Nanite can support the quality of a big scene, to make sure the camera captures a specific amount of geometries instead of rendering all of them.

There is also an extra way of adding content to the project, for example, some additional models after a project has been created in the engine.

In addition, we have been mentioned the targeted shadow in UE5 project should always keep as SM6 in the project setting.

We are allowed to add different levels to a projects to build up layers:

Generally, there are a few important settings in each UE5 project: world partition, world setting and levels as shown below in my screenshot:

We can create multiple sub-levels in unreal engine 5 to put different types of actors in them:

We can drag everything from the sublevel to the main level, and when we change the position of the object in the main level it also changes the position of the object in the sublevel with the corresponding blue level name.

In the end of the session, I have also received some feedback from the lecturer with my assignment, tattoo robot idea:

1. I could think about an aim or dream of my main character, for example, it wants to open a tattoo shop based on it wanting to be rich in the cyberpunk world, therefore it keeps practising on different dummies while destroying most of them.
2. I could think of the effect of showing how the tattoo robot destroys most of the dummies in its working flow, as there can be more interaction between my main character and all the props. And showing how dummies suffer from its plan in my story…

For this blog, I will mainly discuss how I set up the concept of my assignment in this unit and its blocking in Maya. Regarding I have old experience of using UE5 to work on my own film in the past, I will reuse those pipelines in this project as well.

This story I constructed is mainly inspired by a cyberpunk tattoo robot I built in the past in a DNEG masterclass run by Bournemouth University during my bachelor’s course. I was trained to do tattoos several years ago in Romford, in a tattoo academy for several weeks. I have finished the 3D model and the texture of the robot in the past based on my experience, but I found it would be fun to extend the journey with it and structure a scene for it to tell stories.

The picture below is my mood board showing how I have been inspired to create this robot and its additional environment. I am planning to finish a minimum 30 seconds animation showing how it works in a cyberpunk studio, and tattooing with its needle on some human dummies.

I plan to have these elements in this project:

1. multiple female/male dummies in cyberpunk style for my robot to tattoo on.
2. my tattoo robot is the main character, which is called D.O.R., name given by the DNEG company.
3. rigging of the tattoo robot.
4. a designed studio in a cyberpunk style.
5. an environment of showing the extreme long shot of the city with models from quixel bridge in UE5.
6. animating the tattoo robot D.O.R. tattoos on the human dummy and selling this wacky design is my main goal.
7. The baked camera from Maya can be imported to UE5 and used in the sequence.

As I prefer doing my conceptual work and blocking in 3D more than 2D, so I set up a project in MAYA directly. I made a proper studio by carefully measuring its scale through the measure tool in Maya and building up the position of some furniture inside.

Meanwhile, in Zbrush, I block out the proportion of the female dummy through learning the course ‘Female Anatomy Tutorial’ ran by Raf Grassetti online.

I also finished blocking the camera movement in Maya to generate a 3D animatic for me and others to review, or add new stuff into it. The video below is one of the play blasts to show the progression of this scene, I plan to bake the camera from Maya and then import it into UE5 when everything is ready.

In the following week, I will mainly focus on the robot’s rigging development by using the Advanced Skeleton in Maya and polishing the model of the studio set with all those objects inside. Also, getting feedback on the animatic from my teacher and peers. the screenshots below are showing my slow progression on its rigging.

In addition to the structure of the studio, I have been highly inspired by some structures of the architecture from real life. below are some primary photos I have taken to bring me reference in this project.