ITP BLOG
Final Week!
This week I wrapped up my portal and worked with the camera crew to place targets on the levels for camera movement.
I was still having trouble uploading the entire portal to the class’s final project. Todd helped me re-organize my folders and push the file one more time in-office hours. It worked perfectly!
This week has been focused on portal building research and building and completing the Live Link for Performance Capture class. I love a good portal, and I haven’t landed on the type I want to build for the final. Do I go particles? Classic spiral? Or window? My goal is to wrap this up by the end of the weekend.
Assets:
Asset Search:
Below I broke the assets I found by scene—first, the desert.
Can we use this surface trails asset for footprints in the sand? I think this could be beautiful.
Dorm room-
There are a lot of drinking scenes throughout the piece. Vampires love their bloody marys. I think a realistic glass/goblet that can be duplicated throughout the entire piece would be great. Is it too fancy for college-aged vampires? I couldn’t find a solo cup.
What’s great about the dorm rooms is that we can repeat these items over and over.
Moving on to the city scene.
Ever since I received this asset, I have wanted to try and use it. I think it will be exciting to make a procedural cityscape that the character can bicycle through.
World transitions: There are three world transitions in our piece. I think it would be interesting to incorporate some visual queue that is happening. I’m not 100% sold on these particular orbs, but I haven’t come across anything better.
I’ve decided to lean into a project that I’ve been thinking about for a while for my midterm. The idea is to “capture” bears in the wild when they think humans aren’t around. Ideally, I would like to create a handful of 15-second pieces of bears acting like humans. I am modeling the camera work and narration of a BBC documentary until we come upon the bear for the character introduction. At that point, the camera will settle in and spy on the bear.
When I was finally able to get the bear into Unreal, the textures were still missing, I felt that there was a problem going from blender to Mixamo, and I kept losing the textures in that transition.
Error 2 – When I tried uploading my bear skeletal mesh, I wasn’t given the option for “none” – I was forced to select a skeleton mesh of a character that I had already imported. When I did do that, this error would appear.
Please excuse my horrible drawing.
This week I was attempting to make a long take from my woods scene, I wanted the viewer to “fall” into the mind of a predator tracking the character. I feel that the camera movement came out well, but I had problems with animations. The character continues to skip even when I parent the bones between cuts.
This week I worked on developing multiple characters for my piece. Manly, I focused on working in Make Human, Mixamo, and Radical. The hardest part was making a person that I enjoyed, and I kept going back and forth to modify features. I believe I was in the uncanny valley – slightly creeped out by the elements. I’m excited to dive deeper into Maya and develop better characters in the coming weeks.
For my project, I’ve been exploring the concept of a pinata escaping from a party and running down the streets of suburbia to its freedom. At the end of the short piece, the pinata will be grazing in a field with other pinatas like a herd of deer—an ambitious project for sure.
To start, I wanted to block out the house and repeat it into a suburban landscape. After building a house with geometric shapes, I realized it was way out of scale. The house turned out to be about 300 times too big. After office hours with Tom, I learned how to group all shapes and turn them into a static mesh. The problem with producing a mesh this way is that the materials seem to be fixed, but it is scalable. I was now able to build a network of roads and replicate the house throughout the grid. Happy with how that turned out, I changed the skybox to replicate a sunset. The next problem came when I loaded the world the following day, and the houses had all disappeared. Below is are screenshots of my journey.
Week 1 – We’re diving into Unreal Tutorials and cleaning up our computers. I am still in the process of building my PC, so I’ve borrowed a laptop from the ER for the time being. After some tidying up, I have gotten the computer up to speed.
