ITP BLOG
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.
The pipeline seemed to be working perfectly until the end. For some reason, my comp layers wouldn’t link with the footage. I re-made the material multiple times to no avail. I think the next step is to toss everything and try the entire workflow again. I’m excited that I did get the camera movement working perfectly!
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.
I thought it would be funny to put this stock video of a random man explaining something in the forest project I’m working on. He reminded me of a dad explaining to his kids how not to get hurt on a hike.
I had a weird thing happen when I tried to export the video. Everything went well, but when I played the video, it glitched out. Right after it exported, Unreal crashed and the mesh was all meshed up when I came back to re-export. I attached the video with the error below.
This week unreal tested me, and I kept running into errors that led to hours of youtube tutorials, documentation, office hours, and bothering classmates. Things finally started to come together at the end of the week, and I’m getting to a place where I’m happy.
Problems I’m still having:
Successes:
This week I focused on camera movement and the timeline. One problem that I kept running into was the animation scrubbing in the timeline. For some reason, I could not get that to work. It rendered out but wouldn’t play on my timeline.
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.
I’ve continued to work on my Runners High piece this week. Using assets from the marketplace, I built an apartment that transitions into a magical room and then to a glass floor. The process is slow, but I’m enjoying how the piece is shaping up.
