For my first prototype, I presented my most recent animated short, Gothic, to our thesis class, then demonstrating how I went about producing, directing and animating it. I went into the process of finding premade animations from Mixamo.com, importing them into Unreal Engine, setting up cameras, adding the animation and camera movement/cuts to Unreal’s Sequencer, and rendering out clips to be used in post-production.
The main reason why I decided to make Gothic in Unreal Engine was, in a sense, to prototype future projects in the engine. Previously, I had produced shorts in either Maya or Unity, but now that I have a desktop with considerably better capabilities, I decided to test out Unreal’s offerings. One of the really great parts about Unreal in comparison to Unity is it’s curve editor in the Sequencer. For any animators familiar with Maya’s graph editor, it’s virtually the same thing. Without getting too deep into detail because it’s difficult to describe in text, this adds a whole range of customization and control over every single object in scene, and is sadly absent in Unity without a paid add-on.
Another big difference I found for use in my thesis is the difference between high end renderers in Maya vs Unreal’s stock real-time renderer, and how path-tracing comes into play. For whatever reason, I get fairly flat path-traced shadows and lighting with V-Ray or Arnold and always need to go deeper for a better result, but Unreal in my own experience has a fairly robust renderer with very little that needs to be customized, as well as easily customizable fog and environment settings. This is great for anyone who is self-producing an animated 3d short, anywhere that you can save time is valuable to put towards x y and z that you need to also accomplish.
Over the course of this past summer, I became fluent in the pipeline of bringing any character with a skeleton from either Daz (character creation) > 3dXChange (for clothing and accessories) > Maya (for applying face mocap and checking skeleton) > Unreal, or Maya > Unreal for props and other assets, and am confident I can create characters and assets and use them in production for this thesis. Aside from that, I learned of Unreal Marketplace and the incredibly wide selection of high quality assets for sale, and how to customize them or start from scratch similar to unboxing a Lego set and throwing out the instructions.
To summarize, I feel that my time over this past summer to this point in time spent understanding the in’s and out’s of Unreal and its vast uses for 3d animated short production wasn’t wasted at all just because I had to forego creating my feature film. Having the knowledge I do and worked hard to attain will undoubtedly benefit every project going forward, and the only way it wouldn’t is if I stopped in my tracks today. Now that this first prototype is completed, I want to shift my attention to the story and concept of this next film. My next prototype will showcase concept art and themes I want to develop for my thesis, and the last one will be of the story itself.