Week 02 - Human Form

Unreal Scene

Here is the picture reference in my last week’s moodboard:

I found a snow scene in unreal library. I migrated some of its assets including rocks, wood cabins, died trees, ladders, campfire piles and built the scene “village on the cave”. At first the scene was all in white which I don’t like, so I set the brightness to be lower and adjust the color of skybox. After that, I added several pointlights in front of each cabin to light the scene. I also used exponential fog to set the scene to be a little foggy.

Here is my three heroshots:

It is a fantasy world. People’s living condition is crucial. They are afraid of hard weather and the attack of dragons. They dressed in medieval style but not too fancy. In the village, there are common people working as the base and some warriors defending their home.

Lab Documentation:

After we calibrated the mocap room, Cindy and I put the suits on which is very funny.

Then people helped us to attach the markers. Although we have reference model in Motives, it still took us a while to finish the process. I think it’s not hard but just need practice.

To connect all the dots to form a human figure, we need to do it one by one. If we did all the markers right, there will be a ghost -like human body showing in the screen when we do the T-pose. Click create button to actually create it. After that we can see visualized body motions.

This is my personal favourite part: dancing in freestyle! It is so interesting because usually you can’t see all your body motions. The tracking was surprisingly accurate by the way.

We did the jumping jacks and birdy record first and then we started to think we can design an interesting take. Since we were already dressed like ninjas, what if we do a fighting scene between ninja and monster? We downloaded a monster asset from Maximo and imported it into Unreal. But the difficult part is every time you import a new character, you have to retarget it. We haven’t touched this part in class, so Todd helped us remotely.

Here is the screen recording of how to retargeting and do live streaming in Unreal:

For the take, we used a chair as a prop to creating the hitting effect:

Here is the final video: