Please go FULL SCREEN! Me little effort is in glorious 2K.
It's been a while since the last upload and because it's pretty rare for me to publish to my site, I may get wordy here. Just for the novelty.
The way I usually work is to peruse for a new 3D model and get an idea around one I spot and like. This little effort is no different. Usual form is me seeing a model and going: 'Ah, I can do something with that...' I spent a long time trying to make things in Blender. It can be like having a stone in your shoe - someone else said that - but that's me also admitting to some skill shortcomings. There's certain things I'll never get my head around, like nodes and materials versus textures. As for UV Unwrapping - mind officially blown with that one, Scanners style. Insert a shrug emoji here.
I 'ignored' Unreal Engine for quite a while. I mean, Blender to me was a massive learning curve and I did not want a new curve to learn while I'm fairly far down the road with Blender. However, I suspected Unreal Engine may be more suitable to how my brain doesn't work. I've played with 3D quite a bit now and it seems to me the most important factor contributing to realism is lighting. Well there's three factors actually, as I see it: Lighting, lighting and lighting. Unreal Engine seems to be WAY more user-friendly than Blender in that regard - and THAT, is right up my boulevard. UE5 seems to have the whole environment of the scene covered. I'm several versions of Blender behind - but world lighting, reflections and shadows was just a hard work nightmare to me in Blender. Having to put down a shadow catching plane or no shadows present? Wow, very labour intensive. And said plane requiring multiple nodes to work and make transparent? Unreal auto-takes care of all that.
I'm no William Goldman, so as per usual, this is another excuse to play with models and mess about with MoCap animations, hand animated meshes using Control Rig and chromakeying. Green screen in other words. It all adds up to something I have since childhood, been hugely fascinated with: visual effects and special effects. Yes, there's a difference. And today, CGI of course. So, I don't pay much attention to story because of said fixation with all things visual. But this has pretty colours and I had fun bringing the models to life.
This is only my second short in Unreal Engine. I'm using really quite an old version of the software because the main model is incompatible with the latest version. Never quite understood that - can't the developers write a couple of lines of damn code to make it compatible, god damn it?! Yeah, instead of writing the code to throw up an incompatibility message window, instead write some code to make the import work! You're right - it's way more complicated than I understand. It's still infuriating though!
If I get forty-six billion positive comments I'll make a video of the process! Failing that, AI here I come. It's got to be investigated. There'll be no 'Slop' from me, however. I'm only interested in the machine enhancing something cinematic.
If folk are wondering, the music is copyright free. I belong to a site where I can just download music tracks. Owner info isn't provided, so I couldn't credit the composer even if I wanted to. TIMELINE IMAGE
It's been a while since the last upload and because it's pretty rare for me to publish to my site, I may get wordy here. Just for the novelty.
The way I usually work is to peruse for a new 3D model and get an idea around one I spot and like. This little effort is no different. Usual form is me seeing a model and going: 'Ah, I can do something with that...' I spent a long time trying to make things in Blender. It can be like having a stone in your shoe - someone else said that - but that's me also admitting to some skill shortcomings. There's certain things I'll never get my head around, like nodes and materials versus textures. As for UV Unwrapping - mind officially blown with that one, Scanners style. Insert a shrug emoji here.
I 'ignored' Unreal Engine for quite a while. I mean, Blender to me was a massive learning curve and I did not want a new curve to learn while I'm fairly far down the road with Blender. However, I suspected Unreal Engine may be more suitable to how my brain doesn't work. I've played with 3D quite a bit now and it seems to me the most important factor contributing to realism is lighting. Well there's three factors actually, as I see it: Lighting, lighting and lighting. Unreal Engine seems to be WAY more user-friendly than Blender in that regard - and THAT, is right up my boulevard. UE5 seems to have the whole environment of the scene covered. I'm several versions of Blender behind - but world lighting, reflections and shadows was just a hard work nightmare to me in Blender. Having to put down a shadow catching plane or no shadows present? Wow, very labour intensive. And said plane requiring multiple nodes to work and make transparent? Unreal auto-takes care of all that.
I'm no William Goldman, so as per usual, this is another excuse to play with models and mess about with MoCap animations, hand animated meshes using Control Rig and chromakeying. Green screen in other words. It all adds up to something I have since childhood, been hugely fascinated with: visual effects and special effects. Yes, there's a difference. And today, CGI of course. So, I don't pay much attention to story because of said fixation with all things visual. But this has pretty colours and I had fun bringing the models to life.
This is only my second short in Unreal Engine. I'm using really quite an old version of the software because the main model is incompatible with the latest version. Never quite understood that - can't the developers write a couple of lines of damn code to make it compatible, god damn it?! Yeah, instead of writing the code to throw up an incompatibility message window, instead write some code to make the import work! You're right - it's way more complicated than I understand. It's still infuriating though!
If I get forty-six billion positive comments I'll make a video of the process! Failing that, AI here I come. It's got to be investigated. There'll be no 'Slop' from me, however. I'm only interested in the machine enhancing something cinematic.
If folk are wondering, the music is copyright free. I belong to a site where I can just download music tracks. Owner info isn't provided, so I couldn't credit the composer even if I wanted to. TIMELINE IMAGE