In Class Work:
This week we looked at rigging in UE5. While I’m planning on prebuilt rigs for Maya and then importing the animation into UE5, this lesson was still super helpful for if I want to make my own rigs for UE5 for future projects, which is something I’d like to try in a future project.
I have done rigging in Maya before, and quickly picked up how similar the general process is to the UE5 rigging process, just with a different interface, names, and (from what I understood) being more node-based.
Project Progression:
As previously planned, I edited my sketches into a rough animatic. This also includes all shots for my initial idea, as I wanted to have the full version so that if I do have time to add more shots the layout is already there to work from. I also started filming reference for the key shots where there will be character animation. In some of the shots (mostly those focused on the background characters after the transition to the creepy, bizarre vibe), the characters will be static and staring at the camera, so those won’t need reference. If I have time, I will probably add some camera animation in along with the 2D Animated eyes to give the shot some interest in place of character animation.
Since I’m still quite new to UE5, I wanted to quickly test how easy it would be to replace one of the textures in the subway file with my own. I had the sketch from my storyboard for a rough idea of how I wanted the final shot to look, so I went with replacing the text on the scrolling screen as a test since, if successful, this could also be something I keep for the final render.
Reference sketch:
First I located the material for the screen, then the node for the text texture. I exported the text texture, opened it in Photoshop, and replicated the texture by searching for a similar font (I settled on ‘Dogica’ by Roberto Mocci (link), and manually added the semi-transparent grid on top of the letters.
Original:
My replica: