Group Members
Alex, Bennett, Johnny, Ivar and Nicholas
Job Assignment
Due to complications with our group's source control, 2 team members were unable to pull changes of our project. This issue wasn't resolving quickly and it became evident that we needed to assign jobs in such a way that we were able to work independently of the source control. Shots were selected from the storyboard and assigned to team members evenly. This allowed every team member to partake in every step of the film's development process in their own scenes. As the storyboard was only a guideline, team members were encouraged to have creative control and expand upon their respective shots.
Scene Creation
I started work on the terrain for the establishing shot as soon as possible. It was essential for me to get the general shape finished so that the team was able to use the terrain as a blank canvas or as a background for their scenes.
The accuracy of the terrain wasn't a priority as it would only be viewed from afar or in the background.
I created a simple layer blend material so that I could have grass textured on flat areas and rock textured on steeper terrain. The detail of these textures wasn't super important as assets would later be layered over them.
After applying the landscape material I noticed that the texture tiling was obvious when viewed from afar. This was going to be a problem because my establishing shot views the scene from a long distance. I needed to alter the material to help create some variation.
I found a tutorial that utilises a macro scale technique to help reduce the appearance of texture tiling. By applying the techniques learned from the tutorial into my own terrain material I was able to mitigate the tiling issue.
After applying the macro scale technique to the material I finished texturing the terrain and adjusted some lighting and colour settings. These final changes had a huge impact on making the landscape look more realistic.
All that was left was to populate the landscape with assets. I downloaded a variety of Quixel Megascan rocks and proceeded to place them onto steep slopes around the terrain.
This was an extremely tedious task and I often found myself getting bored and working on other parts of the environment; like adding this river instead!
Once the river was complete, all that was left was to (reluctantly) finish placing rocks, followed by using the foliage tool to paint grass and tree assets onto the landscape.
Motion Capture Session
The motion capture session went smoothly and we followed an action list that was produced by Nicholas. We even had plenty of time to record actions not on the list that we could incorporate into our respective shots.
motionbuilder setup
Before importing the motion capture data I first had to characterise the Metahuman skeleton for our virtual actor. This was a simple process of just assigning bones inside of Motionbuilder.
When importing the motion capture data into Motionbuilder I noticed that the skeletons of both the Metahuman and the captured data were different sizes. This meant that the accuracy of the animation in Unreal Engine would not be ideal.
I fixed this issue by rescaling the skeletons so that they were equal in size. Following this, I adjusted the armature of the Metahuman to better align the 'A' pose of the actor in the recorded data. This same process was repeated for all animation clips that I utilised.
testing data
When importing the Metahuman into Unreal Engine the first thing I noticed was that the character was missing his hair. There were error messages that popped up upon opening the project that directed me toward some engine settings that needed to be turned on. Once these settings were applied, the character's hair was (thankfully) returned.
I used a blank scene to test out some of the exported character animations and the results were generally really good. The hands were a big issue though and I had to reposition them in Motionbuilder and repeat this testing process a few times to get a result I was satisfied with.
Additional Scene Creation
The massive mountainous scene I created earlier was really good when viewed from afar, but was not detailed enough for a close-up mountainside scene. Therefore, I decided to create a new scene using the previous scene as a foundation. I picked a presentable side of the mountain and created a more detailed set using the same assets. When designing the scene it was important to cater for the animation take I was dealing with. My scene has the character climbing up the onto the ledge of a cliff from below. I also added rocks to step across on the platform and another rock wall in case I wanted to expand upon my scene using other animations we captured.
Sequencer
Following the same process as the blank test scene, I imported the animation into sequencer and applied it to the Metahuman actor. By repositioning the position of the actor I was then able to align him with the cliff ledge. Creating this scene was a lot quicker than I expected so I decided to expand upon my assigned section of the storyboard and utilise some other animations.
I imported the other animation files I exported from Motionbuilder and proceeded to repeat the same process as earlier for both a stepping and climbing sequence. Originally I used 3 separate Metahuman assets to accomplish this but then later realised those actors would always be visible within the scene. I worked around this by using one actor and creating keyframes within the gameobject's transform to reposition it between shots.
Once the animations were sorted I started on creating cameras and positioning them in the scene for different shot angles. In sequencer I made sure to have each shot go for approximately 4 seconds or less as this is loosely the average shot length for action packed scenes.
The other storyboard scene I was assigned was the initial establishing shot of the mountain and surrounding environment. This was incredible easy and I just animated a camera to fly and pan around, with the massive mountain being the focal point.
I also decided to create a short sequence to introduce our character. For this scene I used the stepping animation from earlier and positioned the camera behind the character, looking up toward the top of the mountain. This helps establish our character to the audience and further allude to the location he is heading toward.
My Shots
These are the final rendered shots of all the scenes I produced throughout the project.
Editing
Once everyone submitted their final clips to me, I imported them all into Premiere Pro. The final order of clips isn't identical to the storyboard but it flows much more smoothly with the renders I was given. After I had the clips ordered, I imported all of the sound effects that Ivar created and started mixing them together.
Once all the clips and sound effects were assembled the film was ready for a final export.
Final Cut
References
Macro Scale Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyl2MbcKuE
Average Shot Length: https://stephenfollows.com/many-shots-average-movie/