Final Submission & Reflection
Well, here it is. My attempt at a 2D character in a 3D environment. Honestly, after all the problems I’ve come across and the lack of time I’ve had to spend on this, I’m surprised that I even have something to present. When I started this assessment and decided upon what I wanted to create, I definitely had a lot more details I wanted to create and achieve in the final result. I wanted to have multiple animations and a more detailed fairy flying in the foreground. I also wanted to have a more stylised 3D background to better blend with the 2D fairies. I was also hoping to play with the camera movement a bit, where the camera would move in slowly to reveal the tree and the fairies flying around it, and to also possibly continue moving to get a zoom in onto the tree and more of the background details. Unfortunately, my other assessments took much longer to complete than I had anticipated (but it was an animated piece, so in retrospect, this other assessment did help me learn a little more on how to animate using SketchBook Pro) and I had some family issues.
The problems began when I tried to export from Maya into Unreal. I don’t know why, but nothing in the scene was imported into Unreal. I tried using multiple file types, such as fbx, mb, obj, but no matter what I did, it wouldn’t work. So then I went a looked at the scene and tried to change the objects into NURBS, polygons, etc. But again, nothing worked. Eventually, I imported the image of the scene that I used in my previous update post, and used that to try and build something.
Then I tried to create a flipbook animation using the fairy I had animated. I watched the VFX Stream video and followed every to the letter (apart from the number of frames I had, which was 48). I downloaded the script, used it to create a new image, and imported into Unreal. But when I placed the image texture onto the material, it started animating, but very incorrectly. It was jumping all around the plane, and was also scaled incorrectly. I went back and made several new flipbooks in Photoshop, changing up the number of rows and columns and adjusting the number of pixels, but this didn’t fix the problem.
So, after realising that that wasn’t going to work, and that I was running out of time, I decided to use the image that did import to build a rough scene and give people a rough idea of what I wanted the scene to look like. I also went and quickly added a few orbs with some emissive light to simulate the fairies, and I added and adjusted the settings on some atmospheric and exponential height fog. I also tried to add some camera movement and some animation to the orbs, but once again, it didn’t render them correctly in the sequencer, so unfortunately, all I could submit is the image above. I’m not sure why I’ve had so much drama with exporting/importing and with getting Sequencer to work properly, (as I have the newest version of Unreal installed) but I haven’t been able to find any solutions to at least have it partially functioning properly. I just wish that I could have gotten at least some effect to work and display in a render, even if it was something as simple as a blinking or growing/shrinking light.
After everything that’s happened over the course of creating this assessment, if I were to go back and do it again, I would basically redo everything. I would set aside more time to complete this, first of all, regardless of any other situation or problems that I encountered. I would also use another version of Unreal or use another computer entirely (even though the one I’ve been using at home is brand new and has the latest versions of all the software I used for this assessment). I would also spend more time learning how to create effects in Unreal so that I could improve the integration aspect of the scene. Perhaps, if I had done things differently, I might have also gone with the other idea I had to create the scene - a character in a kitchen or similar area who causes a fire, which affects the lighting, and lets the smoke escape from a window or a vent that gets switched on.
Overall though, despite the problems I found and had to deal with, there were some aspects that I did enjoy, such as animating the 2D character and in learning and understanding how to integrate 2D and 3D. I’ll most certainly apply the knowledge and skills I’ve gained from completing this assessment into my future animations and develop them as much as possible.
