3D modeling & Animation

3D modeling and animation projects

Blueprints for player view

Blueprints

Today I’m following a Pluralsight tutorial on creating a first person camera and teleportation system using Blueprints in Unreal Engine. In this Blueprint, we are creating a way for the player to “teleport” from VR_Pawn to VR_Pawn1 when the number 1 key is pressed on the keyboard, and VR_Pawn2 when the number 2 key is pressed, allowing the player to move around the scene.

VR_Pawn controller

Here are the views as I click between the original, 1 and 2 keys. (Also, I updated the tree a bit from the previous image, but have not tested it in VR yet to see if the geometry “explodes.”)

Press 2

The Blueprint allowed me to successfully move around the scene using keyboard keys while experimenting in the VR Preview.

This was helpful for understanding the concept, but in order for it to work in the Gear VR headset, I will need to understand how to map inputs from Gear VR instead of keyboard keys.

Adding sound & color

In Unreal Engine, I was able to tweak the BP_Sky_Sphere colors to give my scene a red glow. I then created a Material by importing a PNG image of the root chakra symbol, and applied that Material to a flattened Cylinder to form the disc that appears below the tree roots.

Unreal -  Root chakra
Unreal – Root chakra

For the music, I wanted to insert some placeholder music for now, so I selected this “Relaxing Traditional Music of West Java” that I converted to a WAV file from this Youtube video. Soon I hope to work with a local musician to use original gamalan (traditional Javanese) music instead. I watched this tutorial on how to insert background music.

Now when you hit Play, the background music plays in the scene.

Importing Assets into Unreal

Here is the root of the tree inserted into a scene in Unreal Engine, with the salamander imported and positioned as well.

Note: One of the first things I did was carefully create folders and subfolders for all the meshes I would be importing, because I think scenes and materials can get complicated quickly!

Here is another view, where you can see the mushrooms, and also a cauldron I modeled.

Koi animation

I was able to quickly assembly a skeleton using the Joints tool in Maya and animate the Koi. I did this several months ago and it took me much longer. Again, iterations/repetition really helps you become more proficient and become faster each time. He animates wonderfully in Maya, with a cute little wiggle in his tail.

Animated Koi
Animated Koi

I watched a few Youtube tutorials on how to Bake the animation and export as FBX, then import into Unreal. As you can see in my Contents folder, the model imported with an animation, skeleton, mesh, etc. When I double-click on the animation, it animates beautifully in the editor dialog box. Unfortunately the Koi does NOT animate when I play the scene. Need help troubleshooting this.

Koi animation not working properly
Koi animation not working properly

Animation timeline

Animation timeline

I tried to animate directly Unreal using the Sequencer tool, which seems to animate fine when you play it inside the editor, but again, there is no animation in the actual game. Need to research more on animation.

Rendering and post-production

Having gotten most of the mechanics of animation and modeling worked out, this week I began mixing the audiotrack using Adobe Audition. I found some great websites for sound loops and FX.

http://freemusicarchive.org/

http://soundbible.com/

http://www.looperman.com/

Mixing the sound
Mixing the sound

Audition has a nice feature where you can add Markers to your timeline so you know when certain transitions or sound effects should occur.

Premiere video editing
Premiere video editing

I placed the previously rendered “glowing figure” scene into Premiere, and added sound effects. I also added the soundtrack from Audition.

I was able to get Maya’s Mental Ray render engine working after installing a service pack upgrade. This caused me to tweak the lighting a bit. I began to batch render a test sample. My laptop was able to batch render 120 frames in an hour 1/2. By my calculations, rendering the entire 1440 frames should take only 32 hours!

Underwater
Underwater
Under lily pad
Under lily pad
Before lighting tweak
Final scene

Still needs a few tweaks on audio, but making progress.

Scene 3 – animating discs in water scene

For scene 3, I wanted to show the transition between focusing on the veins, and moving into the underwater scene. I copy/pasted the vein and discs from scene 2, and placed them in my underwater scene with the fish and lily pads.

Attaching disc to motion path
Attaching disc to motion path

Next, I needed to animate the discs sliding through the vein. I attached the discs to a motion path. I tried attaching multiple discs to one path, but they all bunched up into one shape, or I received errors from Maya, so I duplicated the path and made a few tweaks to each one so it varied slightly.

Maya error
Maya error

In the end, I wound up using multiple motion paths and the Hypergraph Editor to tweak how each one animated, so I could get some variation in speed over distance.

Hypergraph
Hypergraph