This week I worked on animation and rendering. The animation part was quite challenging for me. Many assets, whether downloaded from the official Fab library or other online sources which part often had issues. For example, some models were imported without proper skeletons, only placeholder rigs.
I had a small bird that I wanted to animate in a cute but slightly startling way. I felt the bird alone wasn’t enough, so I also looked for a butterfly material from Fab. When I opened its mesh, I was surprised to find that its body and wings were separate! Even though I searched for tutorial videos to learn how to merge the two bone rigs together, when I tried to import it into the Sequence for animation, it still didn’t work. With time running short, I had to give up on animating the butterfly.
To ensure the rendering quality, I did a test render before adding all the animations. The result was very disappointing, the video looked heavily aliased and jagged… So I adjusted the settings again, following tutorials online. Finally, on my fourth attempt at rendering, I achieved the result I wanted.
Then I continued adding animations. I felt my fairyland scene was missing something magical, so I wanted to add elements like a school of fish flying in the sky, but I couldn’t find the fish model I had in mind, and time was tight. Instead, I used a cute little demon character. At first, I wanted it to follow a spline path in Blueprint, but when I adjusted the coordinates, the spline wouldn’t generate new points correctly. So I had to abandon that idea and just animated and rotated it directly within the camera view instead.
Finally, I worked on camera shake. For a first-person animation with running sections, camera bounce is essential. I looked up how to create a camera shake system in Blueprint online, adjusting the right parameters to get the effect, and placed it into the Sequence. I kept adding shake throughout according to the story’s rhythm, which gave me the final result.
Reference and Process screenshot:
