Category: Virtual Production

Follow the demo

Build our scifi scene on Mars

 

I tried to connect UE4 and Arduino this week.

 

I followed Unreal’s official blueprint tutorial this week and leant more about blueprint step by step.

1.Try to work in collaborative project.

 

2.Develop our story and go shopping for reference material, asset packs and tutorials.

Our story is,

Our story reminds me of Pygmalion who fell in love with sculpture.

I developed this story a little.

A genius puppy dog who hates lovers escaped to Mars. She is obsessed with creating art with video recorders. After a long and lonely time on Mars, she fell in love with the 3D boy she created in the virtual world. But the virtual boy’s desire to control gradually increased. Our doggy girl is trying to get rid of the control desire of the virtual boy, while fighting against the curse of hating lovers in her heart

 

I collected some sci-fi assets in my library and I found that some of them are suitable.

1.This one seems like a place to live on Mars.

2.I wanted to use this  one as environment on Mars, because it has better quality.

3.This looks like the virtual world where my virtual cyber boys live.

4.I love this scene ,but I haven’t have it.It’s a space hotel.It makes me think that there will be a story like Kubrick’s “The Shining” happening in the space.

 

For my midterm project，I felt that sometimes to tell the story I really want to tell,I have to choose the assets with not so good quality，because I cannot make them by myself.

In the second half  semester, my basic goal is to make my shots more realistic in UE4（the best possible quality，especially for my character）.

There are few things I want to learn and I tried to find their tutorials.

1.I want to know how to shoot real people in the virtual scene built by UE4.

I followed him on Youtube and he also has a tutorial about how to build a virtual production work station at home.It looks so attractive and I really want to have a work station like that.

All the equipment he have seem unaffordable for me now, and youtube recommended me another video.I haven’t watched it but it seems cheaper and more affordable.

And… a pretty cool video

2.3D scanning：Sometimes I felt that the assets in the Quixel Bridge are limited.They are enough for building American scenes, sometimes I want some Chinese style scenes，but I can only use Japanese style materials instead.I want to learn some basic knowledge about 3D scanning.

There are lots of 3D scanning products and services provided online.I knew some basic thing from this video，

 

And a free app for phones introduction.

3.

1）How to make my character more like a real person？I mean, I hope my character can better convey emotion when shooting at close range.（Except for MakeHuman, I know nothing about making characters，and I want to dive deeper.

I go back to our Week3 and learn more about those software.

A series of tutorial about that.

I have watched one on Unreal official channel，but I cannot find it this time.

 

2）How to better control/adjust my role to make him more suitable for my needs？(If I download a character)

Same as above I think.

 

4.I hope to be more familiar with the usage of blueprints.Although they are simple programming, I still don’t know them very well.

5.How does my character interact with objects in the virtual scene？Like how they drive cars?

6.Explosion effect

I explored market place this week and got some free material.

 

 

I finally edited it by iMovie.

I made 3 shots .Maybe I did sth wrong in the process , and I cannot edit it.（I don’t know why.

It showed like this.

shot1

shot 2

 

shot3

I spent some time on VPN and finally Todd told me that I didn’t need VPN at all.And I also spent some time on figuring out how plugin works. 

Build my no rig old lady.

 

It’s my first time to use blender ,so I also found some simple introduction video about the blender online.

 

 

 

My old lady’s neck also met some problems and when I added the hair, the neck problem disappeared.

 

But in Unreal,I finally found that I didn’t solve the neck problem.

 

Perhaps it’s because I didn’t separate the head, hands and feet? 

 

Before I imported my old lady into Mixamo, I cannot find my old lady’s texture anywhere.I’m not sure whether I lost them in Blender or anywhere else.

I want to name my tuna flower Tina，an Asian female with lots of muscle.

The left one is human rig and the right one is auto rig.

Tina in mixamo and try some animation.

Ask my friend to capture her body motion in RADiCAL.

Tina in MotionBuilder.

Tina in my scene inUE4，it looks quite different.

Q:

How to make nonhuman characters?(like my Tina with a fish head?)

Our story is

and I chose the second one” Tuna is a flower next to the curvy road.In order to find happiness,she has to realise that she is the flower Tuna not the fish Tuna.

I want to make a scene like this one.

It’s a place I have ever been to ,named “YaDan Devil City”.

It’s in a Gobi Desert, the rocks there are eroded by wind.

In my point of view,Tuna is a flower born in extremely harsh environment. One day, some ocean water suddenly appeared in the desert .

Then she started to realise that maybe she is Fish Tuna actually.

So I made a scene like this.

A pool of ocean water suddenly appeared in the desert .At the same time, a grassy path appeared and  stairs made by grass and bushes.Should Tuna start her adventure to find the ocean along this grass way?

video here：

 

At first，I wanted to use “rust metal” as the material of the mountain, but I found that it’s hard to achieve the effect I want,  eroded by wind and rain.

I also tried height map,

 

Question：

I really have fun in making landscape.But I met a problem while trying.

I don’t know what I pressed and all my landscape become these little black spot in the sky.