Project 3

Project reflection (retrospective/post-mortem).

Respond to each question below in relation to the project you have completed.

• • What went well?

    • At the start, most things went smoothly. We had tested a lot of the technology were looking to utilise and were making sure our production pipeline would work. The motion capture apps took some fidling around but eventually we figured out how to get smooth and somewhat accurate motion capture data recorded in the Unreal Engine Take Recorder.
      
      We found a robot asset that fit the aesthetic we were going for and UVed it. Texturing came out pretty good I think too.
      
      Being able to make changes and send them to Harry and Luka with a few clicks inside Unreal was extremely awesome, I wish we had used Perforce for our Maya based projects in previous trimesters.

  • What didn't go well?

    • The second half of the trimester was plagued with issues. Harry and Luka are not as familiar with Unreal and I am so I ended up spending a lot of my time teaching them and fixing technical issues such as actors becoming unbound in level sequences.
      
      The motion capture data took a very long time to clean up, I thought I would have enough time this trimester but due to outside commitments and other unexpected events I was struggling by the end to keep up so I had to ask Harry and Luka to help with it.
      
      The last two weeks were spent rushing pretty much everything: applying the final animation in Unreal, finalising the lighting, optimising rendering settings, sound mix, robot rig, glitch effects and more.
      
      When we tried to render the dystopian world we realised we had not setup any level sequences for it as the current ones were for the utopian world only. This was a complete oversight and should've been picked up much earlier.
      
      The biggest issue was the sheer size of the project and how demanding it was on our hardware. The depot was over 140GB big and required more than 8GB of VRAM to run. My GPU only has 8GB of VRAM. Harry had the best GPU of all of us so he was the only one able to render the project at all. This meant we had a big bottle neck. If Harry wasn't available, then we couldn't render and had to wait.

  • So what did I do?

    • We had a discussion to determine what was the minimum we needed to get the project across the line and was it possible to achieve? We determined it was and were pulling multiple all nighters in a row by the final week. We had tried to get a version of it done by the exhibition but we were unable to due to some technical issues when Harry tried to render. We then settled for getting it done by submission date.
      
      I did my best to guide everyone with getting the Unreal project into a good enough state to finish the film quickly. I added in background characters, gave them animations from Mixamo and dropped them into the scene. I setup render presets for Harry to make it easier for him because he was't as knowledgable on rendering in Unreal as I was.
      
      We were pretty much finding work arounds or settling on compromises while still being able to deliver the final product we wanted.

  • So what should I have done?

    • We thought we had scaled back our scope enough but there were many unexpected things that happened outside of SAE that pulled time away from this project. We should've had multiple avenues of scope that we could've diverted to later on when we realised we were going to be falling behind.

  • Now what can I do differently in future?

    • Now that we are all much more familiar with Unreal, we can scope out future projects much more accurately. Planning is key, making sure everyone has a role, has tasks and there is a reasonably and reaslistic schedule that we can adhere to.
      
      Using more optimised assets or creating all our own assets would be great for next time to avoid the large file sizes and massive VRAM requirement.

  • Now what do I need to learn now?

    • I plan on continuing learning Unreal Engine, both for film also game development. Having done work placement at a video game company, I found my skills were incredibly useful for creating game assets.
      
      With this trimester finished, I have completed my time at SAE and I am now looking to get into the industry full time so my next focus is on finding employment, working on fun projects and joining motivated teams with people who also enjoy this line of work.