n9691910 cg toolkits

I spent a lot of hours on these two videos.

I was pretty porr with tracking the hours but my rouh guess would be 70 ish hours

60% working on the 2d animation

10% research

10%3d modelling

I would definitely go back and tell myself to change the playback of the sequencer to match the 2d media texture, it just looks odd. 

I also would go back and work out the with the green screen cutting out my outlines.

So here we are, after 6 + weeks of working on this it is now complete for submission. Here are my two videos created to show the implementation of 2d animation into unreal engine 4.

In this first video it was quite easy sailing in terms of animation, don’t get me wrong,  it was still hard work , it was just that I had worked out most of the kinks and test experiments before starting so I knew what I was in for, for the most of it. How ever something that threw a huge wedge in the progress of my videos was the ridiculous fact that you can not have two “event begin nodes for two different media players. as seen below

Instead of creating another ‘event begin play’ it creates a ‘custom event’ node. This almost brought my progress to a halt as this meant I could not have two media textures playing at the same time. And what use is animation if it can only be one thing animating. I searched far and low on the internet to find an answer but unfortunately everyone seemed to have the same answer telling me it cannot work. Probably the worst part about this ordeal was the lack of reason the game engine does not have this. So unfortunately I had to break my own rules and do something I, from the start, did not want to do, use after effects. (Que dramatic music)

 My work around involved using render passes of individual media textures and splicing and masking them out in after effect.

here are the three videos that make the final video

as we delve into week 11most of our project are getting the final touches added to them. how I plan to achieve the final compisition by the 29th of October (my birthday) is as follows:

Week 11- finish draft walk cycle. roughly 7 hours (2hours research 5 hours implementing

Week 12-finish walk cycle and 2d extras. (6 hours cleaning up lines and adding colour)

Week 13- review and add and extra touches. (6 hours in case I need it)

the timeline has changed since the previous post due to other assignments that need tending to.

So with the environment done and dusted I have moved on to creating 2d animations to go into this 3d environment. 

for my weekly goals i plan to achieve this;

- Week 10: complete walk cycle draft

-Week 11: complete the video above (line work and colouring)

- Week 12: complete Walk cycle (line work and colouring)

- Week 13: bring into unreal, then submit.

Now that we are in week 9 I’m sure all of our projects are shaping up to what we are hoping to achieve. I feel a little vain in saying that I believe I have already completed what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to bring 2d footage into unreal and I have done that. Something that I think i can improve in is the keying aspect, it’s not exactly production  quality. But any how, time to reflect on the past. 

The thought of bringing 2d into the unreal engine seemed like a huge task that i was incapable and I initially reasoned that it was when I hit the first speed bump. that first speedbump was that the engine would certainly crash if I tried to use chroma key, no mater how good the computer was. So I seeked the help of my tutor who turned me onto an unreal engine forum which had the answers. Ryan brucks had the solution of creating a material that keyed out the green without the computer crashing. I used this method and surely enough it worked.

https://youtu.be/WOx9o0MpNwQ

this is the outcome of a 2d animation I have brought in and keyed out. Outlines are cut out a little bit but I am working on it. The 2d animation itself took 3 hours to do. learning how to key out the green screen took easily 7 hours. 

on september the third I encountered my first problem. I had just learnt how to import videos into unreal through the media player, but the overall goal was to key out the green to make a green screen. When ever I tried to use Chroma key in unreal engine it would crash. Here are screen shots of everything that was going wrong :  https://n9691910cgtoolkits.tumblr.com/post/165062665014/1-i-have-my-film-in-the-correct-project-folder-i 

I asked my tutro about how to fix this issue, I had to use media textures and in the nodes create my own green screen. as seen here: 

1) I have my film in the correct project folder, I have a media player, and I have a media texture.

2)I set my media texture to the film

3) I click the media texture

WEEk 7: I will work out how to use ‘composure’ and how to import media assets

WEEK 8: i will to a test of bringing 2d into unreal

WEEK9: I will create a unreal environment with finalised lighting

WEEK 10: I will work on the walk cycle in the 2d program

week 11: I will continue my work

WEEK 12: I will continue my work

Here are my two different lighting environments, The first is a night time environment with some harsh lights bouncing off the character