ANI181 - Week 10
2021-08-06
What? So what? Now what?
This week, now that the Unreal Learning Tutorials are back up, have been going through the Film and Television course and finished the sequencer module and rendered out a full animation with camera focus following the character as they run through the scene that has boulders falling behind her. This is triggered in the sequencer by an event with a keyframe that activates a blueprint containing the code that controls the boulders.
FirstHourInSequencer_002_Raytrace-Render.mp4The next module was a quick overview of how to work with materials in Unreal. There wasn't much practical work for it as the tutorials just quickly glossed over different types of nodes I'll need to know about further down the line.
The material nodes in Unreal are just as versatile as Maya's hypershade editor and allows for things such as the layering of materials,utilising PBR textures and more all while being able to see a final result instantly as you work.
The module after that is the Real-Time Rendering Fundamentals module which quickly covers how the rendering in Unreal works. Once again it didn't have any practical exercises, it was just covering things I'll need to know in future when using the engine.
There are two types of rendering in Unreal Engine: Deferred Rendering (default) and Forward Rendering. Deferred is more stable and gives better performance. It also has more rendering features but Forward is better for mobile or VR applications.
As I want to use Unreal for creating animated films, I will be using Deferred Rendering almost all the time.
The module also covered some quick tips on how to optimise a scene, such as changing shadow quality with the command console.
I've almost completed the entire Film and Television course with one more module to complete on independent filmmaking with Unreal. Once I finish that module I will work on making two scenes from scratch and rendering out short videos with an animated camera.
For our group project I've been reworking the Maya scene file to make it easier and faster to add things to it. I've optimised the After Effects file as well so it renders less duplicate frames when there is no change between them. All the cameras are also in the same scene now instead of being in separate "shot" scenes.
I've added a displacement map to the map material to add extra detail because the bump map isn't showing though very well depending on the angle of the lights. The table texture has also been toned down and is less bright than before as that is something Rafi mentioned last week was distracting to the scene.
By next week I'm going to be converting the animated textures into Renderman materials and start finalising the finished rendered look we are going for.