Author: Binbin Zhu
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11. Final rendered work
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10. Trouble shooting in render
It’s the most headache part, both two scene have render issues.
For the fantasy scene:
At first I can’t see the ghost beluga and the sea when I was rendering.
For the beluga I originally think it’s because I open this subsurface fake light parameter on material instance, which is not able to render using ray tracing.
But I try different way, it didn’t work, even I tick off, it didn’t work as well. But if I assign the glow material on other beluga, it can work. That shows it’s doesn’t caused by it.
Surprisingly, I just duplicated the character on the lever sequence, and delete the original one, it works! Weird…
Then is the sea, I watch so many tutorials and check the detail panel, And I found this: Unless I select it to level sequence, it will not be shown in render, although it’s visible in screen right now.
After that, I got this view:
For the main scene, when I hit render, it will crash immediately. I tried different render setting but didn’t work.
Finally, I found where the problem is. It’s the waterline setting again… I have to choose add it to level sequence. But this one will cause crash instead of not render that object.
I got this view:
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9. Rendering
After making the animation in the sequencer, I start to render.
I follow the instructions of this video:
The ONLY Unreal Engine 5 Rendering Guide You Need
And I apply that in my render setting
It’s the most tricky part for me.
Because in my scene, the character have different looking with the shadow in the mirror and also has interaction with it, which breaks the physic rule. I need to make sure UE5 can make these 2 effects:
- ghost effect: only cast shadows in the mirror but the main character are not visible.
- vampire effect: only see the main character but it doesn’t cast shadows.
If I have two duplicated main characters with these two effect individually, I am able to control the main character and ghost separately.
I research for lot of methods but they didn’t work, but finally I found this asset which saved my life!
By using lumen and hardware raytracing,
If I want to achieve ghost effect, I need to change this on my detail panel:
click off for visible
Click affect indirect lighting
If I want to achieve vampire effect, I need to change this on my detail panel:
click off
And finally, do this in post process volume, So that I get the effect.
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7. Control rig + bake animation
For my main character beluga, the asset only have skeleton mesh with simple animation. But I want to have more flexible control on my character.
So the first step I create the control rig for this skeleton mesh. Because of the straight body shape, It’s easier for sea animation to rig. So I create the controller one by one:
And I did an animation test by key framing the controller:
Then I realize I also need those preset animations like swim and idle pose which I already have in the asset to give it a sense of naturally floating in water. But I found out the control rig and animation are not fit well, if I want to apply preset animation I have to delay the control rig. So I wonder is there a way that I can use the control rig on top of my animation.
I watch a lot of online tutorial and found out there is a function called bake animation to control rig. Basically, it treats animation data like motion capture data and applies that on the control rig.
How to Modify an Animation Sequence in Unreal Engine: Bake to Control RIg – YouTube
But I found out I couldn’t find my rig inside bake animation button. I found result on Epic game community—because I only have forward solve direction when I was rigging, I also need to add a backward solve direction so that I can bake the animation back to the control rig.
And I manipulate again on my control rig:
I choose and apply the animation that I want for the character first, after that I bake the animation on my control rig and get a series of keys. By adding a additive track of control rig, I got another track to control the animation on top of the original one in a non-destructive way.
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6. Experiment plugin 2: Cinematographer pro
I want to improve the image quality of my work to make it looks more realistic like a real camera output. So I download this plug-in. Basically it is a tool to simulate real world camera setting, and because I have photography experience, I found it easy to use. But the problem is this camera need all the light also have the same lighting value in reality. So I adjust all the lighting in my scene based on this sheet:
And I get this effect:
Progress:
I originally plan to practice walk to sit and stand to walk actions, which are basic body mechanics movements.
But Ting thought it was too much workload, so I cut it to stand and walk only.
I studied the human shape walk cycle online and made my own version. I learnt deeper about how the human body can be performed as a bouncing ball.
Then, based on Ting’s advice, I made the character more cartoonish by adding more reasonable overlapping for different parts of the body. I understand that from root to head is a pendulum or squirrel tail, the leg and arm are also tails that the upper part will drag the lower part. And I come up with the idea by using the blue pencil tool in Maya to draw the overlapping guideline, and also the line of action that I want for root control. Here is what I got: