Category: Final Major Projects and Thesis

This is the final video of my graduation project and its showreel.

Nolan’s film, INTERSTELLAR, is a reflection on time and space, family and destiny, love and eternity. This is also what I want to show and express in my graduation work, and through this short film I want to express my memories for my grandfather who has passed away.

https://vimeo.com/889613179?share=copy

My Final Production wants to express is: Everything is predestined, just as it is known that the end of the universe is the black hole. Loss and accidents run through the lifeline of life. Even if you know this, you should still remember how precious you are to be alive, and strive to live a wonderful life. You should live well with the love of the relatives who have left you, It is the only way to make the memory of relatives who passed away always be remembered and never be forgotten. Cherish what you have now, cherish the people in front of you, and live a positive life. Remember, love is always bigger than a black hole.

https://vimeo.com/890671641?share=copy

This is a demonstration of some of the processes I made.

Reflection and Summary:

This is my first time trying to use UE5 to produce a complete animated short film, which is a big breakthrough and progress for myself. Because the whole process of production is relatively difficult, and I need to be responsible for the entire process alone, including pre-design, script writing, character and scene production, animation production, lighting and special effects post-processing, rendering settings, post-editing and sound effects, etc. , these add up to a very large workload.

Planning and time arrangement before starting is very important, which helps me clearly know what to do at each stage. When I’m confused and don’t know what to do, it can give me direction and encouragement, preventing slow progress and low work efficiency. However, due to the large amount of work and my pursuit of details, repeated adjustments and countless re-renderings, I was almost too late to complete the task within the specified time. Fortunately, I finally completed my work excellently.

Because it is my first time to use UE5, a large part of my time is spent learning how to use UE5, because the scenes I need to create are quite difficult, such as simulating the ocean, simulating black holes, simulating the earth, snow mountain models, dynamic plants, etc. So I have spent a lot of energy and time constantly learning and becoming proficient in the use of UE5. Overcoming many difficulties, constantly trying and accepting failure, I was able to complete one scene after another. This is a process of constant reflection and then overcoming difficulties.

Post production editing and sound effects production are the soul of an animated short film. Sound and editing can bring people a better experience and are often the most important and attractive things. Post production editing reflects the producer’s aesthetic.

This is a reference image for the movie, which is the color scheme I want to refer to. It is slightly retro and has a strong sense of time.

I worked on the entire post editing process in Premiere. Firstly, I imported the UE5 rendered animations into Pr one by one and arranged them in sequence. Then, I made various modifications and edits.

This is my adjustment of the color of the picture, usually through post-processing to enhance contrast and make the picture more infectious.

The main task this week is to set rendering parameters in each project file and scene, ensuring consistency in rendering parameters for each camera, and setting export paths and rendering settings.

And set the movie rendering queue for high-quality rendering in UE5.

Camera movement and camera language are crucial parts of an animated film. If the camera gives the audience a good and natural experience, it can greatly help the smoothness of the animation.

When rendering the distant views of the landscape, I used an ultra-wide-angle lens with a focal length of 24mm.

When setting up the rendering of close-up shots of characters, I chose a focal length of 50mm or even higher for rendering, which will produce better results.

Reflection:

This includes camera angle, focal length, depth of field, camera horizontal line, camera movement, camera focus on the subject, camera transition, etc. This requires watching more movies to learn better camera shooting skills.

This week is my production of lighting rendering for completed animations and scenes.

This is a shot from the movie Inception, and I think it can serve as a good reference for the lighting and atmosphere of my scene.

This is the first scene. After setting up the lighting and fog effects, I tried and adjusted again and again, and finally achieved the atmosphere of a rainy day.

This is the lighting test for the second and third scenes.

Reflection:

Lighting processing can make the image more vivid and tense, focusing the entire lens on one point and highlighting the depth of the front and back scenes. Good lighting can bring a better visual experience to the animation.

This week, I mainly focused on producing animations for the fourth scene, and also continuously adjusted and modified the animation parts in the previous scene.

Reflection:

For the quality of a short film, the production of the animation is the most important, so I spent a lot of time and effort on the animation. I spent more than three weeks on the animation, and even the entire process involved animation production. After the preliminary animation is completed, more in-depth modifications to the animation in the later stage are also the most important.

The main task this week is to create the animation for the second and third scene and continue to modify the animation for the first scene, continuously improving it.

The second scene is mainly the animation of the camera, which uses the displacement of the camera to present the motion sensation of the image.

Similarly, the main animation of the third scene is the motion of the spacecraft and camera, orbiting and moving away from Earth. Through the movement and shooting of the camera, the interactive relationship between the earth and the spacecraft is presented.

The main process this week is to create the characters and animation for the first scene, based on the animation script. The first time I tried to create an animation in UE5, I felt a bit uncomfortable at first because I used to only set keyframes in Maya.

This is the content of the animation script I wrote myself, providing detailed animated text descriptions for each shot, so that I can create animations clearly and logically. It provides convenience for my animation process.

The following is the process of creating an animation, constantly modifying and adjusting, and using my own performance as a reference to make the animation more natural.

Unlike Maya, in UE5, keyframes are set not with the “s” button, but with the “enter” button, and the animation time interface is also different. However, the curve editor is the same, and I can use it to modify many animations, which is also more convenient.

This week I repeated and modified the earth and black hole that I learned how to make before. However, because I felt that the previous style, rendering level and effect did not achieve the realism I expected, so I decided to make it again and improve the details more. To discover more ways to improve the quality of my lenses and renders.

First, create a sky atmosphere in UE5.

Then, importing the map of the Earth and the map of the atmospheric cloud layer

And then connect the nodes to create the material, It should be noted that it is necessary to create a map for the Earth’s shadow part, so that there is light in the Earth’s shadow part and a more realistic effect can be achieved.

Add some special nodes to enable cloud mapping to move around the Earth, resulting in a more natural effect.

Finally, adjust the lighting to check the overall effect of the earth.

Then there is the content and quality improvement of Black Hole：

In UE5, my black hole is created by various nodes and function equations, so I need to check and debug these data to achieve more effects, such as the rotation of the black hole aperture, density, flow speed, frequency, light Halo, color, etc. After constant testing and rendering, as well as looking at reference images, I finally decided on the look I wanted.

This week, I was working on the main scene of my animation, a dirt road in the countryside with rice fields on both sides.

First of all, I first put a large area of ​​the ground (this part of the work area is called landscape in ue5) into their respective positions, forming several spatial structure layouts of the scene. Then put up wooden fences on both sides, as well as mountains and a few trees in the distance.

Then, I import the snow mountains made in Gaea into UE5 through “landscape”, forming a volume mountain in UE5. Import the model of wooden rural houses into this scene.

Then, create plants, including straw models and tree models, in the reserved area of the scene, and use the “foliage” workspace in UE5 for planting. This can create an atmosphere of rural farmland.