#milestone1b

Milestone 1B involved numerous different processes, some of which were already known and some of which were new.

Installing the unreal ART system was rather straightforward, as was creating the character using said system. The full capabilities of the toolset were not utilized here, though some effort was made to explore the different morph tools available and a general understanding was achieved. For the next milestone the character will be designed in a more exaggerated fashion and preferably with long, physicalized hair, to fully leverage the tools capabilities.

The rest of the animation process after that was fairly simple, and the characters animation was completed without difficulty.

Problems arose, however, when it came time to export the characters animation. Whilst the geometry and skeleton had been exported and then imported to UE4, the process for exporting the animation was not readily available from online sources. Eventually the appropriate video file was found and the animation was quickly taken into UE4.

In the engine, the character animation was applied through the sequencer and layered in order to experiment with animation weights, the effects of which can e seen in the rendered outcome. Additionally, the animation, when exported from Maya was too slow. This was fixed by doubling the speed within UE4.

In lieu of a normal camera, a cinematic camera was utilised for this render, and significant experimentation was done on the numerous settings available therein. The settings used in the final outcome was the apeture setting, the contrast and the gamma.

Due to the proficiency acquired in the last milestone within after effects it was considered uneccesary for this milestone to utilise the program to add further touches.

This week I experimented a bit with the custom body proportions in the A.R.T. character rig creator. I wanted to make a character that still had a fairly realistic body shape but was also a bit different from the example body presented.

I put two animations together for the final rendered video, and I wanted to emphasise the second animation, so I inserted a play rate track to slow down the second animation. I looked at a few different play rates; 0.75 was too fast and didn’t really stand out from the first animation, and 0.25 was just a bit too slow so I went in the middle with 0.5.

I came into this week with a basic understanding of Maya and Unreal Engine 4. I spent maybe 30 minutes to an hour in total looking up tutorials or whatnot if I had an issue or needed a refresher of what's already been covered. I hadn't heard of the Epic A.R.T. plugin so I had to learn how to use it. I can now create basic character rigs in Maya and I found it pretty simple once I figured out what I was doing. I spent probably an hour or two total in Maya just working through the character rig creator; getting familiar with features and creating and animating the rig. Maya crashed a few times when trying to export the fbx file and it was time-consuming to have to restart Maya, but it wasn’t really an issue.

Coming into the 1B milestone, I was feeling very confident with my ability to produce a quality item. The character creation using the A.R.T toolkit was something that I was excited to dive into, create a character and get animating (as I have done a bit of animating in Maya before and was excited to extend my already developed skills). However, from the start of this, I ran into complications. When I went to install the ARTV1 plugin, I realised that it was only compatible with windows operating systems, and I only have a Mac book at home to work with. Due to this, I had to use my friend's computer and I had to Install UE4, Maya and the ARTV1 plugin, all on an internet connection which dropped out every so often, and a big shuffle around of data to get enough hard drive space to install the programs. Let's just say it was a very frustrating process that definitely took up the majority of my time working on this milestone.

Because of these issues, when it came to creating the character, I was so worried id be pushed for time that I rushed the creation of my first model. I experimented by widening the shoulders, playing with the torso pieces so they would taper into the pelvis, and adjusted the limb sizes to give the build of a muscular man. after experimenting and building the character, the proportions looked all out of whack, so I decided to use the base character with very slight adjustments like slightly widening the shoulders. This I think created a better outcome overall for the animation, however, I would like to dive deeper into the character building system.

Animating the character was the easiest part of this milestone for me. I smashed the animation out in under an hour, but I wasn't too adventurous as I was still very cautious of the time I was taking. If I were to do this milestone again, I feel as though I could produce a much higher quality animation that conveys a lot more emotion to the faceless character. 

The final stage of this process was putting the components into UE4 and rendering outcome. I had some difficulty with importing the animation for the model into the sequencer. The model would pose in the first frame of the animation, but wouldn't actually play the animation. After playing with the settings I figured out that by baking the animation into the model, the animation worked first go. This was something that I either didn't see in the explanation video or forgot to do. 

Overall, I feel like this week was a lot better than last week, and I just need to work on the workflow and my time management to get the milestone completed at a level I am proud of.

6 hours worked in UE4, Maya and After Effects.