ANI181 - Week 6
2021-07-16
What? So what? Now what?
In the last week I began learning Unreal Engine. In the last few years Unreal has focused a lot making the engine extremely versatile for film making and virtual production and it let me choose from a range of scene templates design for video work. I started the UE4 Film and Television Learning Path.
The first few hours of the course is just getting familiar with Unreal's interface and settings menu. After the first part I played around for a bit inside an empty scene and added some included assets and materials into it. I also added lights and then tried out the modeling tools which were extremely basic and are only good for basic modelling.
Once I got used to using the Unreal interface I watched a quick tutorial on how to prepare an asset in Maya for export into Unreal Engine. I took a model of a can I made quite a long time ago that I had lying on my hard drive and opened it in Maya. As the shaders for it were originally for Renderman I had to delete it's materials and make a new one. Unreal Engine supports only the basic materials from Maya such as lambert and blinn. I remade the can shader with a blinn material and prepped it for export as an FBX file then imported it into UE4. The process was extremely simple and UE4 automatically converts the material so I can just start dragging and dropping the model into the scene and it's material is already applied.
For next week I will continue doing the Unreal Engine Film and Television Learning Path tutorials.
On Tuesday our group met up on Discord and we shared our progress. All moodboards are complete and we have a basic story outline done. Some of the character designs are being redone and Hugo worked on the 3D map model but has asked me to give him assistance. I asked Dan to take over the illustration work for the child character as I am not very skilled and I spent too much time trying by myself. This allows me to focus on the 3D side of things which is where my skillset is stronger.
Luka's friend from the SAE audio classes was unable to help us with coming up with a soundtrack so instead I will make one using a music pack I own.
During class for the group project everyone in my group continued to work on character designs and storyboards. I started working on making the soundtrack by using the music pack I downloaded. I used Magix Vegas which, even though it's a video editor, has powerful audio tools and I have been using for other things such as sound design before I know it can handle this kind of work.
By the end of class I had made a one minute score that is good enough to use to time our edit for the animatic. I still have some improvements to make but I think it's 90% of the way there.
Our group plans to meet again next Tuesday and begin work on the animatic.