Extraterrestrial Breakfast

-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. For instance, one group was devoted entirely to dressing and lighting each scene while another group focused their efforts on creating motion capture animations.

View Storyboard/Sketches
Storyboards/Sketches

I have found that the most effective strategy to start any project, begins with fleshing out my ideas through previsualization techniques. For this project, my teammate made a storyboard based on the script that I wrote, using photobashing techniques. This allowed everyone on the team to understand the requirements of each shot without expelling unnecesarry energy on the storyboard process.

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 actors for the alien to create animated movement for a couple shots in the video. For the shots in which we did not ultilize motion capture technology, we used maya and mixamo to animate the character model.

View My Assets
3d assets

Time constraints led our team to acquire assets from online sources. This allowed us to make steady progress toward accomplishing our goal without being hindered by building and texturing our own assets. for example, We used pre-built 3d assets from Unreal marketplace to help us set up the interior of the diner and an open source character model from sketchfab for the alien.

Tools I Used:

Unreal

Motive

After Effects