ITP BLOG
The flow from After Effects to Maya worked perfectly this week until I tried to link the video content to the plane. At that point, the video wouldn’t connect. I re-named the files, re-imported them, and restarted the project to no avail.
I am looking forward to office hours to fix the situation.
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 did some tests with motion tracking in After Effects. I wanted to play with hand-held footage, aggressive panes, and shaky footage, as I was curious if the 3d tracking would still capture points. To my surprise, it worked completely fine. I then dropped some 2d assets in, did some basic roto brushing and exported them out.
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 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.
For my virtual world, I’m oscillating between two pieces.
The first takes place in a botanical garden.
The second is in a rural home.
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I’ve always been interested in perspectives of wildlife. For this piece, the viewer will take the perspective of a bumble-bee flying around pollinating in a magnificent garden. Ideally, I would like to color the entire world in an ultraviolet pallet to emphasize the bee’s perspective further.
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The second piece, titled “Runners High,” takes place in a rural home on a stormy day. The athlete is training for a marathon on their treadmill. As they dig in, everything slowly shifts into a magical, surreal world. The piece ends with the treadmill timer beeping snapping them out.
I’ve started playing with some world-building tools and importing assets into my scene as I decide which path to take.
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.
