Title: Alpha Betta
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aTuQ771qRE
Student Submission: No
Description:
I built this betta fish as a fully procedural control rig in UE 5.2.1. It is a physics actor that is set to follow a pawn “invisible ball” that I’m actually controlling with a gamepad. Using track recorder to capture the preformances, most takes went straight into sequencer as is. If I needed to fine tune the animation further or control my morph targets for the closeups, I then baked to a second control rig that is not procedural. Some shots that were too hard to do with a game pad, I hand animated the position of the ball directly in sequencer and recorded the fish procedurally following that instead.
Credits to sourced content:
Base fish model: “Betta Spendens”
(Re-modelled, re-rigged, re-textured, re-skinned using maya and substance painter)
HDRIs: Heavy photoshopping combining these two hdris:
“Vestibule”
“Industrial Sunset (Pure Sky)”
Skylight setup, water warping and caustics effects from “Underwater Blueprint v2”
Quixel bridge megascans wooden table, retextured with megascans verdi alpi marble.
Music Provided By PeriTune, “Sad2 Piano and Strings (Royalty Free Music)”
Screenshot of project in-editor:
I can’t believe how good in editor looks at cinematic quality, DOF plus multiple levels of translucency and subsurf. Other than the occasional tripled up translucency sorting issues I’m very impressed this is real time! Getting 90-120fps almost constantly too!
The scene itself isn’t busy, and all the translucency is raster, so it rendered pretty fast at HD.
Materials are a mix of translucency and subsurf. I started with substrate, and the look was nicer, but I couldn’t handle the uncertainty at render time, too many strange things happening, not enough debug time.
Bubble material smooshed from a flurry of youtube tutorials and the UE Content Example pack. Jiggles!
This is my insane procedural rig that I’ve no idea if it’s done correctly, but it got the job done!
Here’s my much simpler “Baker” rig, with a basic backwards solve and forwards solve, plus a cute little face rig for his 6 basic morph targets (top row: glare, flare, eyes closed. bottom row: smile, frown, mouth open)
Here’s the simpler baker rig baked back onto the procedural fishy for some fine tune glaring.
Made use of the niagara sim caches for my bubbles, what a life safer! Baked my “bubble tornado” into a subscene and just brought it in to various shots when needed.
My ref for texturing and lighting, using midjourney for concept art and generating a fish tile which I then painstakingly re-painted / cleaned up by hand to get a non repetitive non glitchy diffuse rough and height. A lot of substance painter work after that. Fin lines are done by forcing the UVs to be straight and using a tiled vertical band texture.
My masterpiece of a storyboard.
