Star Wars Project: Episode III: Revenge of the Diff (Against Have Revision) (We Love Perforce)

 Can also be titled:

Revenge of the (Trim) Sheets, Revenge of the Game Res, Revenge of the Rigs, Revenge of the Skin , Revenge of the Nick

Based on whatever gave you the most trouble on this sprint

Team Progress:

    The team worked together to migrate all the assets we've made to a new project in UE 5.4.2 instead of 5.3- we plan on taking advantage of the new animation, nanite geometry, and volumetric fog features 5.4 has to offer. Everything migrated smoothly and we maintained our project velocity through the change.

    While the 3D artists made progress completing the high res and game ready versions of their respective assets, the animation department (me) began rigging and skinning the actors in order to prep them for animation in Unreal.

   ( While skinning on the walker went relatively smoothly in Maya, the animation department (me) forgot to consider that in order to animate in UE, the skeletal mesh needs a Control Rig- which does not import over from Maya. Neither do constraints. Or IK handles. Or set driven keys. Or anything I set up in the last sprint's rig Range of Motion. )

    The Up-res walker was brought to UE to continue the rigging process, where I spent the next week and a half researching a way to combine an IK and FK set up in a Control Rig to make it useable for animation straight into unreal. This was very difficult and I had to do a lot of research (read- find a bunch of youtube tutorials) to make it happen.

First working demo of control rig

    

Rig Hierarchy in Unreal

Animatic Update: Version 03

    There are two different IK legs set up in the control rig that I tested in version 03 of the sequence: currently, the right leg is working much better than the left leg, but further testing is necessary (yay). 

Also featuring:

Updated first pass on lighting, including an updated HDRI/skybox, volumetric fog and a dynamic smokey fog material in the god rays render

First Pass of Lighting in Scene

Camera updates to focal length to keep the focus of the scene on the intended actor: camera no longer loses focus on the trooper that moves closer to the camera

SFX placeholder: right now it's ripped straight from Rogue One, but we intend to have a pass of sound fx once animation is more finalized

Animation test on the first 90 frames of the walker

Star Wars Project Episode II: Attack of the Cameras

 As the pre-production cycle came to an end, the biggest hurdle our team faced turned out to be my own hubris...

Team Progress:

    During the second sprint, the team worked together to lock in our proportions for our planned characters, create a proxy rig and establish a working Range of Motion for any moving assets, finalize the proxy models for our environment and planned props, and begin taking our hero assets into ZBrush for their high res pass.

    As a stretch goal, we also decided to finalize camera positions and movement by the end of June 5th- final camera animation was not originally due until Sprint 4, but the team decided that with established camera angles and animation at the end of Sprint 2 Pre-production, the modeling team can focus extra attention on the buildings and props that appear up close in camera, giving the necessary priority to models that need that additional detailing. We're hoping this camera lock will allow production to flow smoother as we wrap up pre-visualization.

  

Test Animation: Range of Motion for Trooper and Walker

    It's a good thing we decided to work on the cameras when we did, because our layout artist (me) ran into several unique issues regarding the import and export of cameras between Maya and Unreal 5.3.

    Exporting cameras from Unreal to Maya or another Autodesk software is a relatively smooth process; getting cameras to look the same from Maya TO Unreal, however, is a horrifically painful ordeal that took up the majority of my week to research into and fix. 

    It turns out that in order to export cameras from Maya to Unreal, there are several preparatory steps to take in order to have Unreal recognize the fbx as a camera to import. Additionally, this doesn't factor in settings like aspect ratio or depth of field. I did end up manually re-creating the cameras to the best of my ability natively in Unreal, but I found a good couple of resources online that detail how to import cameras from Maya:

  

Youtube Camera FBX to Sequencer resources

    With the cameras figured out and locked, despite their best efforts, we were able to complete the following goals:

• Finish Camera Pre-Visualization
• Finish Character, Prop, and Environment Proxy Models
• Finish Asset List Documentation with all planned final models
• Begin Character Up-resolution and rigging

Sprint 2: Maya Layout vs. Unreal Layout

Stay Tuned for Episode III...