Category: Final Project

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.

In scene construction, I follow the principle of “large elements first, small details later,” meaning I start by placing elements that have the greatest impact on the layout, such as buildings, trees, and roads, and then use smaller objects to break up the rigid boundaries between them.

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that in this project, I experimented with the MeshBlend and EasySnow plugins. These tools allowed textures to blend seamlessly at the intersections of objects and enabled me to cover any model’s surface with snow, both of which helped make my scene more realistic.

Edit landscape in Gaea

Layout

Add trees

Add Fog

Add gorcerys

Preview

Story

Brief

The officer drove to the village to recruit soldiers

The officer found that the village was full of disabled people whom unsuitable for military service.

The officer found an old man and ordered him to join the army, but he refused.

The officer insisted, but the old man continued to refuse

The officer suspected that the old man want to defected to the enemy and intended to arrest him, but found that the old man could not be touched, like a ghost.

The old man explained that he couldn’t join the army because he is died at the war, same as all people in this village.

The officer was shocked and confused, and the old man explained that it was because the officer was also dead.

The officer turned around in shock and saw a drone had crashed through the front windshield of the military vehicle, emitting a burst of flames, which froze the officer’s terrified expression on his face.

Storyboard

Concept

Generated by Midjourney