Dazzling Digital Art

  This week in class I began the next project which is to make a game sequence with animations in Unreal Engine. I spent a lot of time looking at the Marketplace and searching for ideas. I found these adorable little creatures that inspire me from a pack called KUBIKOS made by ANIMMAL Game Assets. It is paid content but within my budget so I decided to purchase it and use other free Marketplace items for the worlds I want to create. I feel very inspired by these little creatures and I hope to create a game idea in an open-world format.  I started on a forest type world with a waterfall as shown above. 

  This week in class, I focused on compiling my work for my midterm presentation. I created this powerpoint using a template on Canva to showcase the work I have done so far this semester. Each slide shows what I accomplished week by week. It also shows the work I completed with the Unreal Fellowship. Personally, I really like my multicamera sequences and the new world I am now creating and trying to expand! I am proud of what I have accomplished so far and I hope to continue to learn and grow. 

  This weekend, outside of class, I practiced creating an animation sequence of a character waving. I don't have much experience with animating a character and this is the first time I was able to animate a character successfully without it looking too janky or having the keyframes move too fast. I followed along with some more of the Unreal videos as best as I could. Although the fellowship videos are hard for me to understand, I feel proud of the work I have done so far on my own, since animating is not my strongest skill. I feel proud of the progress I have made so far with animating. I also continued to work on my midterm presentation and getting everything together on Dropbox. 

  This week in class, I focused on creating a new map with the same assets as the multicamera sequences. This time however, I worked on making the world a lot bigger and more detailed. I watched some of the Unreal Fellowship videos and tried to animate a figure, but was not very successful. Animation is not my strong suit. Moving forward, I want to try to make a longer cinematic flyover with the cameras in Unreal. I also finished the Animation Fellowship Week 1 videos. I also began preparing for the midterm and started on my presentation and documenting everything I have done so far. I started creating a Canva presentation and compiling the work that has been completed so far. 

  This week in class, I worked on keyframes and multicamera sequences in Unreal. I learned how to use and export multiple cameras in a scene using different angles. In the video above, I used Cesium Ion (which I learned how to use in another class) to go to Mount Fuji in Japan. I then made three different camera views and exported it. I also created two more sequences with a world that I designed myself using a pack from the Unreal marketplace.  I also continued with the Unreal Fellowship videos and got through the Introduction to the Control Rig video. Once again, I found these videos pretty difficult to understand and I feel like they are geared more towards professionals who are more experienced in the industry. I have never used Unreal before and these videos feel a little overwhelming to me. I tried my best to follow along but struggle as animation is not my strong suit. 

This week outside of class, I worked on creating sequences within Unreal. I used Cesium Ion to plug in Google Maps and create flyovers of Tampa and Tokyo. The cameras are a little wonky in the videos, but I am going to work on making the animations smoother. In the Tokyo video, the camera spins around aggressively and I believe I figured out why. When moving on the Z axis, the camera quickly has to make up for the track it hasn't been on, so it abruptly moves. I am going to test out ways to fix this in the future. 

  This week in class, I worked on learning how to create keyframes and animations within Unreal Engine. Using sequencer, I was able to create this small keyframed animation of one of the Unreal Engine test files. It is not perfect and meant to be longer, but it is progress with animating objects in Unreal. I also watched the first few videos within the Unreal Fellowship. I watched up to Transitioning to Animation in Engine. I found these videos to be hard to follow and understand, but I tried my best.