Last week, I had the VFX assets all ready to go in UE, set up the shots in general, and posed the most essential scenes. This week, I will flesh out the details of each scene, import all the animation files into UE, and modify the details of the animations again.
These are some arranged shots and unadjusted animations. The process of importing Maya into Unreal is quite troublesome because the calculation method of each software is different, and Maya animation has another driving method in Unreal. I am also experimenting. I tried it many times and searched a lot of information and tutorials to ensure everything was fine.
I summarized the principle of importing. Basically, we first need a “puppet” of a character. This puppet is used as a body, and then the “animation that makes the puppet move” is imported to drive the activity of this model, so the model file only needs 1, but the animation files require 33. I created 33 folders so that it is more apparent.
This is the effect after enriching the shot:
This is the animation sequence file I created:
This is the imported character model. I created multiple materials. To make the fins translucent, I made a separate material. So far, the effect looks good.
Challenge & Reflection:
The challenge this time is the replacement of software. The import of Maya and Unreal seems simple. Still, the steps are very complicated because Maya’s coordinate axis calculation differs from Unreal’s. After all models and animations are imported into Unreal, the world coordinates The axis will be cleared, so sometimes I have to manually move the animation to the position it should be. This is because I needed to fully understand this process when making the animation, and this may affect the new animation in the future. Animation replacement has an impact, but most of the animation production has been completed, and it is best not to move the world axis now.
Modification of animation:
Last week, the teacher made many specific suggestions for animation modifications, which is still the case this week. Most of the advice this week is straightforward and small, including hand movements, the speed of the character twisting the body, the rate of the hair, unnecessary key poses in some shots, etc. These small things can be discovered with the naked eye. Dynamics are more prosperous and more flexible. At the same time, through research papers on body language, I found some helpful animation methods. I tried to integrate these methods into my animations and saw significant results.
This week’s work looks relatively simple, but it took a long time, so I’m doing the equivalent of consolidating the conversion process.
Next week, I’ll be further tweaking the animation details and UE FX shots, adding animation and FX resources to each shot.