Month: November 2025

For assembling and rendering shots, I continued to apply techniques from the film industry, such as using practical lighting sources to mimic logical light sources in the scene, achieving natural and textured lighting.

In terms of animation, I tried using Cascadeur’s Inbetweening feature, which saved me a lot of effort in interpolation. However, the generated results had many issues—characters often moved with stiff necks, and their footsteps were inconsistent in speed, requiring manual adjustments.

Human-like actions differ from the animations I’ve created in the past. They often lack large, exaggerated movements, yet subtle differences can completely change a character’s personality. Fortunately, the principles I summarized in the first semester still held true: once establishing the order of movement for different body parts and mastering motion damping, meant that creating good animation was simply a matter of patience.

After careful selection, I finally found a decent model on Sketchfab. However, its production standards were highly irregular, with parts and UVs scattered chaotically. I had to consolidate them from over 40 materials and rework the UVs and textures.

For rigging, I used modular rigging components shared by @postprocessed on YouTube. Although the lack of customization caused considerable trouble when animating the car door and steering wheel, the vehicle chassis physics it provided were quite helpful.

Metahuman

This was my first time creating human characters. In the past, crafting realistic digital humans required mastery of human anatomy sculpting, texture creation, and advanced rigging techniques. Now, with the powerful tool Metahuman, I can quickly create the characters I want without spending hundreds of hours. Long live technology!

Commander V1

V2 (Abandoned)

Driver

AI-assisted modeling for Metahuman

Initially, when creating the officer and driver characters, I manually adjusted them bit by bit from default models. However, after learning about the capabilities of ComfyUI, I decided to invest time in developing a 3D model generation workflow. After spending three days deploying the model and configuring the Python environment, I finally got this workflow for generating head models up and running. Although the conversion to Metahuman wasn’t perfectly accurate, it still provided an excellent starting point.

Cloth Simulation

Clothing creation was the most challenging aspect of this project. To save time, I opted to use third-party files from the internet. However, problems arose immediately. Since I had set high-quality standards for this project, almost none of the models I found online were usable as-is. I spent a significant amount of time adjusting the clothing shapes, reworking UVs, and creating textures using the PBR workflow.

But the difficulties didn’t end there. Since three of my characters are amputees, their empty sleeves and pant legs required cloth simulation to serve the narrative purpose. Unfortunately, the clothing I had painstakingly modified was only suitable for simulation within Marvelous Designer. The exported Alembic files, nearly the only format UE5.6 could read for simulation data, ended up being 9GB per character per shot. This completely overwhelmed my hardware and disrupted my workflow.

After spending three to four days researching almost every cloth simulation software and plugin available on the market, I concluded that none were compatible with my workflow. As a last resort, I started learning UE5’s Chaos system from scratch and managed to create passable cloth effects.