Week 14 - The Final Performance

Starting straight from where I left off I’m going to continue my work animating Jade using the real time capture.

My first take was alright but now I want to try and layer some different movements over the top for the eyes so that the eyelids don't close too much, as can be seen during the middle of the scene. I’m also going to record the audio using my phone this time.

This adds a little more work as I will have to manually sync up my audio with animation for the final piece, but for now I can work with what is captured automatically to edit the piece to how I want it.

To set up my actor and live input next to each other (so I can see how I should act and get my timings right) I needed to compile this blueprint so that the Base sequence plays as soon as I start the level. I used this walkthrough for the Unreal BluePrints :

https://odederell3d.blog/2019/12/23/ue4-create-and-play-a-level-sequence/

Here you can see my input and the ready made sequence playing alongside one another.

The next steps are just slowly editing the animations and layering things until I have what I need. For the Base Animation I slightly altered the lips the animation tracks for the lips. When opening my base take in Unreal's Animation editor you can see how some tracks had no animation in them.

These tracks included tongue motion and mouth shapes associated with creating phonemes, so I can only assume that these tracks had no animation in them due to my iclone take being unable to have this motion automatically created with the audio tool in iclone. Therefore I decided to have a play with these tracks to better sync up my audio and animation, the slight alterations are very subtle but make the whole final piece read better.

Here is my final piece with the original, motion edited and motion layered placed next to each other. (Using sequencer I also taught myself how to render out sequences within Unreal, another really cool tool showing the power of real time animation. These 4K sequences only took ten minutes to fully render)

At this stage I have now completed the main goals for my final year project stated in my proposal. But I still have a little more time so I want to continue with some stretch goals, the first being the creation of the short cutscene.

Using all of the data I have just created I can place the scene into the snowy level, then export out clips and edit them together. Here you can see me adjusting my cameras to create my desired shots.

Finally I rendered out my first attempt at the final scene, added some sound and a few extra effects in Adobe Premier to give the final piece a bit more polish. This is the result:

There's a lot of things that could be improved but with the project drawing to a close I need to carefully decide what to do now. I would like to try and get Fenrir in the cutscene as well so I’m going to revisit him to finish off some of the bits I didn't get a chance to complete earlier in the project.

I also need to add some more motion to the camera, the scene feels pretty dead at the moment. Hopefully I will have Fenrir working so I can add him (even if only at the end) to the scene.