Shrink-ray Commercial

-creative process-

The Challenge

For this assignment, my classsmates and I were tasked with the challenge of creating a short and snappy ad for a fictitious product. Our overall goal of this assignment was to leverage a real-time game engine to practice virtual production workflows. We utilized the resources of our university's virtual reality lab to create this video.

My Solution

In order to satisy the objectives of this project, my teammates and I decided to split off into groups and delegate tasks to one another based on our strengths and interests. We made use of the multi-user interace feature in Unreal Engine to facilitate our workflow. This allowed for multiple team members to work on the same project file simaltaneously, thus speeding up the process of arranging and dressing the set for this video.

View Storyboard/Sketches
Storyboards/Sketches

I have found that the most effective strategy to start any project, begins with fleshing out my ideas through putting pencil to paper. Although these drawings may be nothing more than just a bunch of doodles, they served a very important role in helping me get into the right head space for designing the visual elements of this project.

Motion Capture
Motion Capture

The whole project was created with the process and technology of Motion capture in mind. Through implimenting Optitrax Motive alonside Unreal Engine, my classmates and I set up rigid body actiors for the shrink ray, camera, and background plane. This process allowed us to puppeteer these props sin a way that provided realistic movement.

View My Assets
3d assets

Time constraints led our team to acquire assets from online sources. This allowed us have a first draft finished by the end of the first shooting day. We used a pre-built set from Unreal marketplace, an open source shrink ray model from sketchfab, and shrink ray visual effects particle animation from Unreal Marketplace. The charatcer model, rig, and animations were all extracted from Adobe Mixamo.

Tools I Used:

Unreal

Motive

After Effects