Week 13

    This week, I continued working on two of my projects that I started. One was the metahuman project where I scanned an actor’s face, captured their motions using Motive Optitrack, and retargeted the mocap onto the custom metahuman. I’m at the point of constraining the ball. I was able to import the reference video into Unreal much like you would import an image sequence into Maya. I then keyed the ball to fly in and had to play around with activating the constraint, deactivating the constraint to animate the bounce, and then activating the constraint again. This was more of a test run, because this is the first time using Unreal Engine’s constraint system. I realized I wasn’t rotating the ball with the flow of the throws and bounces, so I’ll go back in and do that. I’m now noticing how messed up the hands are. I’m not sure how this happened, but the fingers are super spread apart and some of the mid fingers are flipped up. Of course, I would have to bake the metahuman’s animation onto a control rig to counter animate those issues.

    The second project is the prison scene. I simplified the gate door, so viewers could actually see the prisoner’s body and face. I also decided that I would have a different beginning to the scene. The prisoner would be clanging his tin cup up against the prison bars. That’s when the guard walks in all high and mighty and slaps the tin cup out of the prisoner’s hands, leading to the guard being pulled and slammed into the bars.

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