This Milestone came with many of the same problems I came across in the first two milestones, along with a few new ones. Again, I couldn’t get ARTV1 to open the animation portion of the plugin, so I decided to experiment a little and work with the Morpheus Rig in order to get an idea of what I wanted to work on for Assessment 2. At first, I began to animate the rig in order to replicate the original video on Blackboard, but partway through I decided to play around a bit and create a unique animation and play with personality. The above is the result I was happy with - a character who was a bit arrogant and cocky and which utilised some finer details, such as eyebrow and mouth movements.
Again, not too many problems at this stage of production, but once I tried to import the animation in Unreal did the problems really begin. When I went into Unreal to import the animation, either the animation and/or character didn’t import at all, or it imported into parts - and parts that I didn’t even use - such as beards and hairstyles. Again, I tried some different methods and looked up some potential techniques to fix it, such as selecting only certain roots/bones, etc., and importing without a skeletal mesh, but nothing worked. Because of this, I also tried to create another animation, this time using just a simple piece of cylindrical geometry and tried to import this new animation into Unreal, but this didn’t work either. So, in the end, all I had in Unreal was the static mesh of the cylinder.
After this, I tried to animate again in Unreal, but again, I encountered the same problems with the sequencer and with rendering, where none of the animation would play, including camera movements.
Below is the scene I made for the third milestone. Nothing too advanced here, just a basic beginnings of a building and a camera movement similar to the one in the original video on Blackboard. I also did some render passes on the scene that I had (ambient occlusion, base colour, final image and scene depth). I also tried to import the animation I created into After Effects, but I the video wouldn’t import properly and didn’t appear in the editing window, so little progress was made in this area.
Despite the problems that I had, I did enjoy animating and want to learn more about how to integrate and compile animation into new forms and styles (like what was shown on Blackboard) and about how to create visual effects in Unreal.
After dealing with all these problems, overall, I spent roughly 5 hours on animating (4-5 hours on the Morpheus Rig, and roughly and hour on the cylinder), 2-3 hours in Unreal, an hour in After Effects, and about 2-2 and a half hours on reflection.
