The Fellowship
I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in Epic Games Pilot Fellowship Program. The full time six-week intensive blended learning experience was designed to help experienced industry professionals like myself in film, animation, and VFX learn Unreal Engine, understand the state of the art in virtual production, and be able to build teams using leading technologies and techniques in the emerging field of real-time production. The Unreal Online Fellowship Program included , live training, guest lectures, and mentorship that focuses on Unreal Engine fundamentals, model ingestion, animation and mocap integration, look dev, lighting setups, and cinematic storytelling.
The Goal
Six short weeks to both learn the Unreal Engine and develop a strong knowledge base of both the methods and tools used in Virtual Production. These tools and methods include working in the Unreal Engines Realtime Environment
Model ingestion
Lookdev
Lighting setups
Cinematic storytelling through applying and working with virtual cameras
Directing motion capture sessions remotely
Animation and mocap integration,
Temp facial motion capture and application with the iPhone,
Working remotely with multiple team members in a shared environment.
The Making Of Hunter Hunted
The Concept
I wanted to create a short that would allow me to use all of the new techniques I was learning in the Fellowship. My concept became Hunter Hunted, a short teare piece that plays a little with the idea of two very different characters as we witness an encounter between them deep in a jungle setting.
The Plan
We start with an overview of the jungle with a few hints of wildlife as we get a brief flythrough of the world beneath the canopy high above.
Our flight path follows an insect of some kind through the jungle reaches a clearing in the jungle, revealing a creature deep in the jungle searching for something, we don’t know what or why but it is obvious he is uneasy with the sounds he is hearing.
A human type female enters the frame from above as the two begin an intense standoff in the jungle clearing.
The creature attempts to intimidate her with a deep guttural roar… She smiles playfully as she leaps into action with her dual battle knives, sprinting towards the creature.
The creature like wise pushes its tank like body into action as he runs towards her with his weapons ready to strike.
At the last possible moment as our creature leaps towards the female for the kill she drops to the ground sliding beneath him gutting him with her battle knives.
The creature falls to the ground as the female slides to a stop and rises to her feet to confirm the kill.
As the female approaches the creature, it begins to stir she has no time to waist and presumably commits the creature to death.
The Marketplace
With only six weeks to learn the software and produce a short film, we were given a limited number of credits to purchase assets from the Unreal Marketplace to assist each of us in creating our short. Epic Games provided us with Echo, the human female for animating and applying motion capture too where needed. I selected Grux an Epic Games Paragon character for my creature. Grux came with game animation assets and textures but nothing else.
I had to re-rig Grux with my own rig to be able to animate him in shots that could not use mocap or pre existing game animations. The Jungle foliage was created from several asset sets of trees and foliage which I placed all using the engines foliage system. Sounds were a mix of Unreal Marketplace sounds and additional audio I purchased for things I was unable to find in the Marketplace.
The Music
I didn’t have time to work with animating lip sync or trying to clean up mocapped lip sync so I decided to go with a piece where I felt the music could communicate the feelings I wanted. I wanted something more primitive sounding but slightly otherworldly as I wasn’t making any distinction as to whether we were on earth or some other planet. I landed on an excellent piece of music I think fits my shorts tone perfectly.
“Power Nordic Vikings Trailer” by MrHumble on the Envato Marketplace
How It Was Made…
The Initial Storyboard Thumbnails
These are the first images generated outside of my head that others can see…
Thumbnail Animatic with Music
This is the first pass where I push the initial images out of my head and put them to music.
If you are wondering why I am adding the music so early, part of my concept was to let the music drive the visuals so my actions and cuts happen on specific beats and moments in the music score.
The Refined and Expanded Storyboards
After seeing how my initial visual ideas work with the music, I begin to fill in the gaps and flesh out areas that need more visual information.
The Storyboard Animatic & Music
Here is the expanded Storyboard Images set to the Music to refine the timing and placement of imagery.
My Final adjustments were made in the Unreal Engine Sequencer or in Adobe Premiere where I assembled everything for my final output.
Camera Blocking
This is my early camera blocking, you can see I open a secondary app where I can see my animatic over the Unreal Engine interface. This allows me to see my animatics while I'm working with my cameras in the unreal engine. The whole process seen in this main sequence video took me 43 minutes to complete so, I sped the video up x6 to make it a reasonable length to view.
The Rough Assembly
Here is a look early on as I start to have enough elements to begin blocking in my motions, cameras and environments I can begin to see the short film taking shape and it is here that I may decide to make additional changes for reasons that range from seeing everything in motion and realizing I have too much or too little time to do something and I have to get creative to make it work or realizing a different camera angle would work better or a tree is in the way or sits in an awkward spot. It can be literally anything…This is my last chance to make adjustments before everything gets too complicated and becomes a house of cards.
The Mocap
To supply our characters with motion we had a few options, Existing asset animations from the Unreal marketplace, Traditional key frame, Motion capture, or a Hybrid of the two. I chose all of the above… (Additional Info Coming Soon)
For Echo it was pretty straight forward being a Humanoid to use Motion Capture which I directed remotely. The mocap performer, technician, and myself connected remotely through a Zoom session. We used an XSENS Mocap suit, a self contained suit with sensors to capture the motion data. There was a small stunt where I needed Echo to slide under the creature and since we didn’t have access to a mocap stage, I used a Marketplace animation asset for the slide and modified it to fit my needs in Maya by animating on a layer.
We also had an early version of the Unreal Live Link Face Mocap App for our iPhones. Though I used it for getting Echo’s face quickly animated the motion is a bit subtle. If you look closely you can see her eye darts and some facial movement. I really wanted to do another pass at this but just ran out of time.
The Animation
Echo
As stated above there were a few methods we explored to get our characters moving. You can use Unreals Sequencer to blend animations together in my case I used this to transition Echo from her run to her slide but in order for this to work relatively seamlessly the characters root must be in a more game engine position directly beneath the character at all times. In motion capture the character is offset from the characters root to get the relative position in the world, but this can cause wild uncontrollable movement in your character if you try to blend between the two different types in the Sequencer.
Because of this issue and the extremely short amount of time we had to produce our pieces I tried to separate the use of any dissimilar root animation methods. Where I couldn’t avoid it Mocap and game animation was rough blended in Sequencer then exported to Maya where I could clean up the wild blended area and re exported to the Unreal Engine.
Grux
The same issue existed for my creature with a few extra issues, Because of the creatures size and hunched upper body the mocap ended up feeling a bit stiff so some parts I used while others i reanimated the head and neck as needed when it is looking around. In the standoff section I was able to use the existing in game animations that came with the Marketplace Asset and blend them fairly well in the Sequencer.
The one motion I needed that wasn’t supplied with the Grux asset was when he is airborne and falls to the ground tumbling to a stop. And for this I needed to do a custom animation that couldn’t be mocapped for the obvious reason of not hurting the mocap performer or equipment. This particular character does not come with an animation rig and even though I am primarily a character and creature animator, the reason I picked him wasn’t only for his appearance, but also the large list of pre existing animations he came with which I was hoping to leverage to get more done in the short six weeks we had. So to be able to animate Grux I had to build my own custom animation rig.
