Week 13: Unreal Migration and Work-Arounds

 This week in Advance Production, my team has started to move into Unreal. About 95% of our shots from Maya are ready to go in Unreal, leaving most of the final clips to be rendered out in Unreal. As work for our animators has started to tone down I had Faris working on poses for the poster and Vicky looking into additional sound effects for the final video. Some other work that was done this week were updates to my own shots and the graphic for the Power Drink ad.

For my own shots, I went back to make some minor changes. Changes consisted of adding more follow-through movement, timing, and translation key adjustments. I feel that by adding these smaller movements, the animation reads better for the quick and impactful hits on monsters.

 

The process of exporting the Maya files into Unreal ended with more files than expected. Shots that had monsters in them, mine included, were exported separately from the other rigs. I communicated with my team about the naming convention to keep the files organized. In doing so, importing the files in Unreal was less chaotic and stressful for our layout artist.

Changes were made to the graphic to add some much needed contrast. After rendering out a new Can turntable animation, I went ahead and changed the color of the background to make the can stand out. After cropping out the empty space of the 2D assets (text, explosion, etc), I animated the images using the Ultra Key, Opacity, and Scale settings in Premiere Pro. I liked that I was able to have some control over the animation timing through Premiere compared to the default animation that is applied in Canva.

Overall, there's some work that needs to be done in Unreal in regards to camera positioning and improving the render settings in Unreal. This will be done this week as well as importing any missing shots as well as importing the new sound effects for the final video.