Category: Unreal Engine

this week, I try to search some fun way to match my concept idea within my Touch Designer also some sort of skills.

I mean touchdesigner is really powerful software, and i can combine lots of interaction from camara and give some motion graph feedback if you design, like the video below:

So, I wanna mix the handgesture and songs beat, make it more fun, there also have a example which is made by UE5+ TD:

This is my project’s proposal

This project is related music and make it more visualization, interactive. The main aims to create a small interactive game with the music beat, but there is so many kind of material forms can combine together. And give the audience a special experience in music playing and have fun. Sometime people will follow the beat and dancing or sawed the air.

Background
This project concept came out from my daily life and my UE5 class. In my personal, I really like to listen to music, especially Kpop song, they have strong beat and those idol will dancing to presentation it in Music video. In this time, If we can dancing at the same time release pressure with body move, hand shape even kicking some where or facial expression.

To create an emotionally engaging interactive animation that encourages users to refresh the music live not only just listening but also doing some movement, recharge your energy, relieve fatigue. I try to use TouchDesigner and UE5( if yes) to create a game film use gesture to interact the songs beat or sentence.

• Experiment with motion and sound design
• Encourage audience participation
• Create an immersive emotional experience

Visual Style & Animation Approach
Maybe I will use 2D background mix 3D motion material combine together to become a film like 2-3 min.

this week we leaning a special skill that I really like it is 3D Screm. This skill always shows on the crowded places in big city like Wuhan, Shanghai…this kind of city in China. and How to made it?  introduce the setup for Virtual Production with for live link cameras and NDisplays

First: Know the 90 Screen and the principle of showing the 3D aniamtion:

• the inside screen: standard compositing like the whole room without 90 degree angle
• the outside: extend in front of frame edge should be match.
• animate must match both route simultaneously.
• horizon must be consistent inside the scene.

Actually, the real process and manupilating is not easy to be match as the real view. But it is still a good way to show and present obiesly.

Basically, this motion in 3D screen + NDisplays would be rendered twice, then people can see this animation in the reality world but like real 3D display. and for the details, just like the process below:

During this process, this is hard and need to adjust the screen in “nDisplayConfig” , which is a kind of blueprint.

This is how nDisplayConfig shows out.

Also it can add an IP address if you want to do a real-time update inside.

Once see the defalt screen, the rightside window you can find a “Projection policy” and choose the ” Mash”， and add our Right screen and left screen separately. So we have 2 screen should render out after finishing the Building layout.

After that, save it and go back to Level, starting the building process.

For me the hard thing is to match the screen and make 3D animate more bigger and show a more powerful visual impact.

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:

This week, I mainly worked on lighting adjustments and animation, with a focus on lighting. I’ve decided to leave the animation for next week, so I first tried adding volumetric fog and setting up the lights.

The DirectionLight seemed too bright, it actually made the environment I created hard to see, and it overexposed the original colors of the materials, which lost a sense of realism (P1). I then adjusted its position again. This time the color looked more textured, but it was still too intense and a bit exaggerated for my taste (P2).

After that, I followed a tutorial video on setting up ambient light, but I couldn’t get it to look the same as in the tutorial. So I dimmed it down first, went to the ExponentialHeightFog light settings, enabled Volumetric Fog, and kept adjusting the angle and position of the light. I also changed the Intensity Scale of the SkyLight and tweaked it many times. Eventually, the environment looked better, and this is the environment that I chose.

Then, I began adjusting the composition of the scene. To make the upcoming camera animation work better, I angled all the tall trees toward the center to create a visual guiding effect, especially in the initial forest, to build an atmosphere that subtly pushes “you” forward.

At the end of the week, I was feeling pretty confused. So I went to ask my teacher, Serra, for help and feedback. I remember Serra said my story had too much animation, it would be very hard to finish in such a short time. She suggested that I change my story board to a first-person perspective. That way, I’d have less animation to do, and it would help the viewer feel more immersed in the forest atmosphere. I think she made a really good point. For someone newbird to UE5 like me, it’s not about making an amazing story right away—it’s more important to understand and get comfortable with the tools in UE5 (especially since I’m still not very familiar with it, and often don’t even know how to do certain things).

I started feeling more and more anxious, but what’s the use of worrying? I just had to start taking action. Gradually, I noticed the scenes I was building didn’t really match my story anymore. So I decided to change my original story concept. The current version of the story is roughly this:

(First-person view) “I” walk through a dim forest, feeling nervous and scared by the atmosphere, kind of like the forest Snow White runs into when the hunter spares her. There aren’t actually scary creatures in the forest, the fear is just imagination. Then, as I run in panic, I end up lost and stumbling into a beautiful new place by accident.

So I started adjusting my UE5 project accordingly. I also plan to experiment with lighting to make the whole forest feel more atmospheric. But before that, I tried walking through the story in first person view, just to test it out.

Then, to create a sense of mystery while transitioning from the tense forest to the magical forest—just like in my storyboard where a hand emerges from the bushes, followed by a little boy, I placed a large bush at the middle between the two style of forests. This way, it can partially hide the view and help build that feeling of mystery.

While creating the forest, I kept trying different ways to place and adjust materials to make the environment feel vivid and full of life. I grouped plants and flowers using “Ctrl+G‘ and then copied and pasted them，this really helped efficiency up and improve the overall look.

To be honest, working on the same scene for a long time started to feel quite draining and stressful. Sticking too long in one place didn’t actually make the visual result better, so once I roughly finished the fancy forest, I shifted my focus to the stress forest at the beginning of the story.

After completing the afterpart overview, I started building the initial “forest of fear.” This section uses a first person perspective, so visually, I need to create a narrow and dark atmosphere through a crowded environment. To do this, I created a dense forest with closely spaced trees.

Looking at the second image, it still felt far from enough, so I made changes in the Landscape Mode, raising the land higher on both sides, leaving a slightly sunken path in the middle.

I tried using the foliage painting tool to build the tense forest for the earlier part of the story. I thought that to convey tension, the environment shouldn’t feel too open but rather cramped and dim. However, every time I painted using Foliage Mode, the result looked messy and disorganized, whether I used Single mode or tried Erasing after painting, I couldn’t get the tool to work well. The vegetation didn’t “grow” in a visually pleasing or orderly way, and I’m not entirely sure why. So, in many areas, to keep things organized and control the composition better, I ended up manually placing each plant one by one which is the old stupid way.

At the same week I try to learning some lighting set to prepare the next week or after building landscape part, so I watch lots of video on Youtobe, I will attached two of my favorite tutorial.

Here is the Tutorial to create the nervous vibs.

In this week, we leanning the dynamic lighting about how to add the light and built the house to show the light types and change the light color. and I learn a pretty cute name “Lumen”, whichis in Unreal Engine 5 is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflection system designed for next generation consoles. But for me at this moment it is quite hard to use well.

About the homework，I started building the forest scene using Landscape Mode. On the first day, I had no clear idea how to begin, so I referred back to the world map I had drawn earlier and slowly adjusted the material colors and scales.

When I looked at it from a faraway distance, it felt too simple, so I decided to add a stone path. But after searching for a while, I couldn’t find a suitable stone path material. Then, in Fab, I found an ancient Roman style path, but its material was too bright; it almost glowed in the dark(see the picture), and overall it looked too urban and didn’t fit the forest setting.

So I wondered if I could paint my own path instead. I created a Plane and found a pretty good material for it, though I wasn’t sure if the tiling would work well. While learning the tutorials, I came across a nice pond asset and thought: maybe I could combine the path with a small pool, that might look better. So I started setting up a little pond scene.

Then I followed a tutorial to create the water material for the pond, but the material I made turned out green. After looking carefully, I realized the sample color for red wasn’t set correctly, different red reflection actually produce different blues or even greens. I also had to adjust the transparent . Finally, I got the pond and stone path looking the way I wanted.

Reference and New material

This week I began working on my main project. Even though many knowledge point were covered in class, I couldn’t remember everything clearly when I actually started. So I had to learn some skills on my own again. I also ran into several difficulties when I use in my project.

For example, I wanted my terrain to have some hills and slopes, not just be completely flat. So I looked for tutorial videos online (https://youtu.be/ZDD-JMcfEII?si=M4WXiAipYc_fzy2N) about creating terrain. At first, I didn’t understand how to set up a texture blueprint, but luckily there were free tutorial videos that showed internet that I could adjust the roughness, Metallic, ect.

However, the scale of my landscape material was too large at first, the UVs parameter too small and looked very strange. I then found a tutorial video in Blibili that explained how to change the UV settings in the material node. (I found the Landscape Coordinates and adjusted the Mapping Scale. After trying different values, I chose 5, which shows me the effect I wanted.) Then I started placing and editing materials. (Some attached screenshots are in Chinese version，because I temporarily switched to the Chinese version while working. I’ll change it back to English later so everyone can easily to understand.)

After that, I began sculpting the terrain without a clear plan. To be honest, the world of my story isn’t fully clear in my mind yet, but I knew I didn’t want just flat woods—I wanted land with some height changes. So I looked at many references, including works by a concept artist I really like from Bulgaria, Ismail Inceoglu.

Reference of Forest