Summer 2023 - UE5 Personal Project
Read on to see my process.
My inspiration for this project actually came from myself. I was standing in on an artificial turf one day, just taking in the cold air and cloudy skies. I thought that it'd made a great scene, so I recorded it as a reference for myself later.
For the scene, I wanted a more grassy foreground, and something more majestic in the background, perhaps some mountains; so I put together a board of references using PureRef.
Inspiration and references
To animate the character movement of standing idly and kicking their leg, I decided to give a video AI mocap tool a try - DeepMotion. The tool takes a video recording of an actor (which in this case is myself), and rotoscopes it to generate the body rig.
The body rig is then animated based on the movement in the video.
Before the animation was ready to use, I had to first retarget the Inverse Kinematic (IK) Rig inside UE5. This retargets the skeleton generated by DeepMotion to that of MetaHumans. This would allow me to use the animation created in DeepMotion on Metahumans in UE5.
DeepMotion AI motion capture and IK Retargetting in UE5
For the character in my scene, I used Unreal's MetaHuman creator.
After importing the animation into UE5 and applying it to the character in a sequence, I hand-keyed some adjustments additively to clean up the animation.
Metahuman Creator and hand-keyed animation clean up
To generate the mountain range in the background, I hopped into Gaea to design the terrain. This involved the mesh generation, adding a texture map, and a snow layer. The mesh and texture maps were exported into Unreal.
Putting it all together in UE5, I pieced together Megascan assets from Quixel Bridge, the terrain from Gaea, and the MetaHuman. With final adjustments of the sky, lighting, and details such as fog, the scene was done.
Environment design
