Animation Relaxation
[Animation At Ulster University Second Year Blog]
By Matthew Kane
Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/matthewkane
Showreel: https://vimeo.com/matthewkane
Friday Alec Lip Syncing Sound to a facial Rig:
http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/current
Facial Rig Lip Sync with Blob:
Got to 11 seconds club site for animation resources, download audio clip. Import audio file into Maya by moving and drag and drop file into time slider. Offset the audio clip and key frame some silence when imported the matrix file and the file was not recognised. I used the alternative file it had something to do with plug in or file type the audio was saved as.
Block in body and poses after lip syncing when animating. You might have to tweak animations to accent the character. Do a rough pass and then after this do the main posing. Easy to do and just refine facial features after turning off symmetry so it looks more natural and realistic by adding in subtle details and expressions to the face. Do a layered approach, do block ins then do specific expression in the face. Break up the work into words from phrases and elongate or exaggerated for effect depending on the audio and the pronunciation. Do not try to do long dialogue break it into manageable segments. Don’t over animate when the character is facing away from the character you won’t need to animate them speaking as this would be a waste of time. If you have a good animatic you will have planned this out and will show you what you will need or any changes to make early on.
Go to the expression editor , to squash and stretch blob character. Act out and record facial movements for audio queues. Record the performance and acting for animation reference and to make animation more realistic and anatomically correct also timing and mouth positions and muscles it invokes to make certain poses/ movements. Use squash and stretch. Make one side of the face a symmetrical of the other by offsetting it by a second or two, by moving controls. Hold frames and block out with as little key frames as possible will make the rig look like a muppet but by adding in-betweens it will make it look natural and fluent and then spline the movements and edit it in time editor eg. Slow in slow out etc.
Wrapping up and texturing the scene:
Testing Water:
Final Water:
Process i used and tutorials :
Brian's lecture on lighting in unreal:
Unreal Engine Lighting Features with Brian:
Basics:
Lightmass / Prebaked light: is baked onto textures and applied to objects in the scene in real time at 60fps, caters to dynamic shadow casts. Word settings are light maps without these without these there wouldn’t be any light.
Dynamic shadows uses a lot of CPU power and can be slow and very time consuming waiting for your computer to load or render it can also lead to more crashes or your machine to freeze.
Lightmass area or volume concentrates prebound lighting information for close up detail.
Static / Stationary Lighting: Mobility is not going to move. It can be prebaked. If it is set to moveable it won’t cast a shadow. Stationary light can do dynamic and static objects at the same time. It is not so CPU intensive.
Dynamic / moveable light: static objects overhead for the CPU would be massive due to the volume in the scene. Resolution of the Scene/ shadow maps will not be as big if it is lowered to allow a better flow. It needs a high CPU power.
Immersive material: emits light itself, colour and light channel and emits it into the scene. Immersive to static light has a draw back that some of the lighting won’t be great.
Post Processing effects: used all the time in lighting in environments using a solar gradient along with the depth of field. Maya renders in layers unreal does the same except in realtime for use of VR and is much faster but is not as clean an image. This is not great. Light leaks due to resolution shadow maps. If it is to low it doesn’t know the boundaries to create or perceive shadows it bleeds through. Reduce the size, the resolution and make the scene smaller or the area where the scene is set up.
Sky light: This can be dropped into the scene. Light will bounce of and will globally illuminate by default 1 to 10 max for bounce it will become really slow if you go beyond 4. If it is small it shouldn’t really impact much. Is like the point light or area light in Maya. Directional lights are used for outdoor scenes.
Fog rays: is quite intensive. Localised fog is more dense in an area of a scene using particles casting fog rays to be very intense.
Volumetric fog is also realtime.
Changing Colour and opacity , doesn’t need to render or preload PBR workflow and lighting for unreal and how to set them up by setting material generation to get realistic effects making it look correct.
Go to Viewmode light , lighting only. Go round manually changing lights radius colour and dropoff etc. Needs to be consistent.
Create a blueprint from the objects from objects from the scene Prefab. Go to attributes change it in there and it will change in for all the same objects in the scene. Manage them as a group. Pre made Prefab/blueprints. Lighting needs to be baked from a preview as shadows are dynamic. Exponential fog click volumetric fog and ramp up the settings. Light shaft bloom/occlusion.
Extinction scale: Before baking focus on areas you want light and detail in. Lightmass portals volumechich tells unreal there is a hole in a building so interior scenes will have a lot more information coming in from the exterior, averaged out by direct information via portals.
Bake in light building lighting – light quality , preview shadows is good for iterations but poor outcome the final outcome though is production quality.
Blueprint class / start off with actor , go to event graph to script object , drag into the editor to create components. Class is a bit more complex and creates nodes that pin and execute. Go to timeline animation track , numbers , colours and go to create tracks.
Float track and vector track with 1 decimal point and 3 decimal places. Shift click to create keyframes on the graph in intensity template. Event graph new node light intensity and attach to point lights by dragging and dropping on an object or a use as a reference to an object.
Colour coding for matching and pairing things up. Create a flicker in the light for the different values of the fire and press play to view your animation. Refine it so it is not so intense. They will all do the same if using a blueprint for all the same objects in the scene. Colour tracking go to change colour value output in the same manner. Colour spelt like American version “color”. Blueprint tutorials are online more for interactive games or game mechanics.
NBC Unreal: Post Process download specialised textures take screen graph edit scene in photoshop and apply to a look up table and post process it and it will be automatically applied to all the scenes in the file.
Adding textures:
I had alot of problems with textures and uv's for some reason they wouldn't do what i wanted so i had to then assign materials by faces and then resize and reshape them so they looked like those around them in the scene with the same texture for example here is the brick texture i had to mess about with to work.
I final managed to get it to work and it looked very realistic which was good and i then final was given the diving board after 11 weeks by Andrew which was the only asset he did.
I still felt like the floor tiles where to dark even after i brought my texture back into Photoshop and cranked up the contrast it had little to no effect.
Scene Gallery of everything coming together and textures being applied:
Scene Progress Lighting in shower area using emission i also created the drains and the shower heads and shower handles along with the vents. I tried to align everything and have some logic and perspective using the tunnel as a frame to narrow the vision and focus towards the pool.
It was very dark at the start like this :
So in order to make it brighter i cranked up the emission and added in more lights long the corridor this still wasn't enough so i also added some to the walls in some of the areas.
I also this created alot of noise see gallery below.
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