Final Major Project

Final Product:

Ideas And Planning:

Unreal Engine 5 & Autodesk Maya

For my first week, I was learning how to use Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 5 in tandem. I want to design my scenes and animations using Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 5 for rendering and lighting.

I believe that Unreal Engine 5 has a great overview of realistic rendering due to the lighting capabilities and the tools at hand such as megapixels – – if I was to ever go that route, I would have no trouble worrying about assets & or textures if need be.

I understand that there are multiple methods to approaching this goal. Firstly, I could always use Live Link, where any animation I create is automatically captured in Unreal Engine 5 without the need for baking textures and animations, as long as Unreal Engine 5 already has those existing textures. Secondly, I could do everything in Autodesk Maya and pack all the existing data into a cache and bake animations, allowing for easier exports. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, so I am looking at which workflow best suits me.

Character & Scene Selection

I was unaware of what type of animation or style I would like to approach. I was set on a few ideas:

• Recreating an existing western film scene into an ‘anime’ style version, i.e., ‘How Rocky III would look like if it were a 3D Anime’.
• An original story using Japanese-inspired themes and design or Japanese animating techniques.
• Recreating a Japanese anime scene – for instance, Tokyo Ghoul (2015), as a 3D animation variant.

Japanese anime scene – Tokyo Ghoul (2015) anime <-> Manga comparison of a pivotal scene.

Miro Board Link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOoosQyg=/?share_link_id=104539323002

Stage One: Development of a Death-loop animation

Planning

• I had to find game-ready rigged characters for maya/unreal workflow.
• I then began animating a death-loop sequence using two characters.

Models from: https://builtbycolossus.com/store

• I would next begin developing a block out of how I wanted my animation death-loop sequence to begin and do the first death.

Trial & Error

• I began encountering problems such as Importing failure, Character rigging glitches, texture remapping disappearing, animation smoothness being ignored, and countless more.
• I tried troubleshooting for about 10 hours and realised my situation was devastating.
• I later discovered the root issue of my problem was that my rigs were not ready for unreal engine 5, and would require re-rigging, which means re-animating.
• Therefore, I had a choice of rending in Maya only to continue the existing project with its current problems or start anew.

Scrapping Project / Restarting

I decided to redo my project and scrap the existing idea as there were too many issues that I was too inexperienced to fix. Instead of challenging my ego to power through the animation, I kept the same principle and idea of the death loop, but with a different character, environment and process.

• I created a block out of my new storyboard in still frames to develop an idea of how I want these new scenes to turn out.
• I decided to keep everything simple and work with a basic white room and keep everything as minimalistic as possible to ensure rendering time would be as fast as possible, and to guarantee there would be no errors within the files later down the line by proofing all of my models/assets and work.

Model from: http://www.3dfiggins.com/Store/

• I wanted to work on my 3 scenes I would develop and create something that would be aesthetically appealing and simple because my main goal was to create something cinematic to some extent and the composition would be quite important for this.

Some Mistakes & Errors

• Due to time constraints, I would have to do test renders and keep them as possible final renders, as I did not have time to playblast all my scenes. Upon doing so, I would sometimes see mistakes like this, where during an action, my character was meant to do something (press the button). Still, there would be an inch gap between the character and the button, causing animation errors. This meant that I would have to re-render scenes as I went along and correct them.

• I also realised that upon rendering, random components of my model would turn invisible from lighting errors, causing major flaws that I would have to, later on, correct with post-editing to cover these mistakes.
• Many similar issues arose surrounding lighting consistency too. Some of my shots would develop a blue hue due to all the reflections, whereas other scenes would be grey and washed out from camera positioning.

Self-Reflection

If I had more time, some of the things I’d like to improve on would be:

• Creating more death loops
• Making the animation more fluid and ‘robotic’ (spending more time on graph editor and refining keyframes)
• Adding more obvious emotion/personality to the character to display frustration/happiness
• Find a correct working rig and test before committing to animation, so less time is wasted