Unreal Engine Fellowship: Animation 2023

I am very stoke to finally show my project for the Unreal Engine Fellowship: Animation training.

Thank you for the opportunity to be in the amazing program Epic Games, Brian Pohl, Cathy Cheo-Isaacs, Kaye Vassey, all the talented instructors and TA's, and guest speakers. I leaned so much in this fellowship. I've been using and teaching Unreal Engine for a little over 5 years now and I am always still excited to expand my workflow and learn some new tricks.

My shot is called "The Beat Down". Its about a bully wanting to pick on what he thinks is a weaker female. Little does he know he is about to get taught a lesson he will never forget. The rules of the fellowship was to have 15 seconds of continuous animation and one camera move. Of course I went overboard and had over 30 seconds of animation and dialog. I cut the shot down to the most action packed part of the shot and went for that. The camera animation is all keyframed. I used an empty actor as a lookout constraint to the camera so it was always looking at the actors. In the end I added some camera shake to certain spots in the shot and I animated to focal point to control where I wanted things to be in focus. All the background characters are from the Epic Games Marketplace, they are the Paragon series.

I used Reallusion Character Creator 4, Zbrush, and Substance Painter to create the two main characters. For the mocap I put a chunk of it together using IClone 8. I had a bunch of fight mocap that I wanted to use, so I got the main fight sequence going. Then a lot of cleanup, making sure the fist connect, characters looking at each other, making sure on body parts passed through each other. Then for the dialog I used a AI voice generator for the female and Live Face for the facial mocap.

I want to go back to this shot and finish all 30+ seconds with the dialog. I also want to see if I could get some rain in the shot as well, as long as it looks good. So I will post version2 when I get it complete.

Hope you like it!