New technology, new possibilities
In Fall 2020 I attended my first Fellowship program with Epic Games to dive into the world of their engine “Unreal”. It was a blast to say the least. Naturally, my focus was animation and virtual photography. The character to work with was called ECHO, and was kindly provided as a pre-made asset by Epic Games.
For this under water setting I had to change Echo into a dive suit. So I modded textures and added simple geometry for a helmet and for the fins. The workflow between Maya and Unreal was a bit clumsy still (back in 2020), but already promising. I used also Maya for the body animation.
Interesting was also to drive Echo’s facial expressions with a phone app and blendshapes from maya.
This short movie is pieced together from pre-made assets, so it mostly was a technical exercise. For a “real” version of this story, would I want to tell it, I would design my own, more fitting character and environment assets. But, it was an interesting experience to use existing pieces to build a first version of the movie in relatively short time.
Virtual photography is of great interest to me, so I especially enjoyed the camera setup inside of Unreal, which has many references to the real world physics of actual cameras and their lenses.
A great exercise was also to explore the whole process from writing to storyboarding, recording voice talent, animating cameras and character, setting up the environment and lighting and then fine tune it all in FinalCut to a complete short movie.