Full-process animation creation based on UE4.

Regarding my personal project, I had some ideas in the second semester. When I was making the second semester’s cooperative project, I was considering using some of the assets at the time for the projects in the future. The project that always starts from 0 will spend a lot of time in the preliminary work, but my technical skills are difficult to improve (from the experience of my undergraduate).

My inspiration actually came from this video:

In this video, the speaker introduced the animation pipeline in Overwatch in detail. I am very interested in the process.

In fact, during this period, I gradually determined my future research and work direction. I will learn the technologies based on the real-time rendering engine, and with TA or TD as my career goal. Therefore, in this semester, I will create a personal project that is convenient for my future development. I will use a variety of DCC software to make assets, and finally render them in UE4, making shaders and materials in UE4. The final effect should be a series of animations similar to the play of the game animation or victory Pose animations in Overwatch.

In the first week, I mainly found some references and simply drew a concept picture of the character:

This semester I worked with Karl and Sean, and we all want to learn more about Unreal Engine 4. Trying to use ue4 to make an animated short film is a good way to learn. In the beginning, our inspiration comes from a small eyeball.

Karl showed us the eyeballs he made according to the tutorial. The effect is very shocking. The production of this eye comes from an official live broadcast of ue4:

Our thinking started to expand from how to use this eyeball. The first thing that came to mind was to make realistic characters. This is what Karl is good at and I am also very interested in it. In addition, what we think of is the Cthulhu element. I happened to be watching Tanabe’s comic “The Call of Cthulhu” recently. His works are exquisitely portrayed and realistic, and the open pages are very amazing, using the ultimate lens composition to show all kinds of indescribable objects shockingly to the readers.

So we imagined a short story plot:

The explorer discovered an abandoned village. The village was obviously abandoned for a long time. The interiors and buildings in the village have some elements of Cthulhu culture. There is a church in the village. The church has obviously been remodeled, and the gods once believed in are shattered, replaced by a statue of a terrifying Cthulhu monster, and the body of worshippers in the church. The explorer walks to the back of the church, and a strange sound comes from the dense forest. When he pushes aside the bushes, there is a huge eye oncoming him.

According to this story, I tried to make a few atmosphere pictures with PhotoShop.

Afterwards, I discussed with Karl and Sean to determine our production direction. Sean will mainly make some models of scenes and props. Karl will focus on the scenes in UE4, and I will be responsible for the production of characters.