This week was dedicated to compiling all my assets into unreal, setting up the scene and animating the camera to get a first animation-less draft and at the time of writing I can say that I succeeded in doing just that!
While there are some issues with clipping and the jitter at the start those are all issues that I am proud to have as they are emblematic of me arriving closer and closer to a finished project.
Importing all my assets into unreal was actually quite simple and was at most a bit time consuming as I had to manually link up textures and assets
But since I organized all assets and textures into their own grouped folders it helped to make the set up go by that much quicker.
Past that it was about recreating my blockout from Maya in unreal and again while a bit time consuming it was overall quite simple thanks to all this being planned out all those months ago. However what was challenging was figuring out three things: the camera movement, dealing with wall clipping and the lighting.
In the blockout the camera swings around the pointer so that it moves in a perfect circle and always stayed locked onto the central figure. After some experimenting I was able to recreate this in unreal by pairing the camera to a cube that I placed in the body of the person and rotating that cube making the camera swing around in a perfect 360 degrees.
The wall clipping was solved by using the Visible in Scene Capture Only setting to make the walls invisible to the camera, while not changing any of the light conditions in the room that would occur if I just used ‘hide’, when the camera was inside them and then making them visible again before the camera would have them in frame again.
The lighting however was my greatest difficulty thus far as I am not a lighting expert. After looking online for brief descriptions about what all the lights do in unreal and playing around with them for a day I was able to get a lighting set up that I believe work in creating a beautiful but not necessarily uplifting lighting environment for the scene.