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...