Animating for a Cinematic short

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey guys,

I’m very new here (first post in fact) and I’ve got a few problems I’m trying to think through for a short I’m making for Uni. So to start off with some info, in the past I have made a few shorts which were rendered in Blender. Nothing involving characters so far, but rather some low poly landscapes featuring surreal flora. This next assignment I was planning on doing in Blender again but since reading that UE4 went free I’ve been teasing the thought of doing a realtime/high quality pre-rendered animation instead which would enable me to work a lot longer on the motions and assets since I don’t have to spend 200 hours rendering the **** thing.

So I’ve had some experience with the old UDK but I have no idea where to start when it comes to using the engine as an animation tool. Luckily my plan is to mostly have a static scene with a lot of camera motion so I’m hoping that might simplify things a bit. However I plan to do more on later shorts so I would still love to hear advice about how I might go about making my own cinematics.

Sidenote: since I don’t currently have any expertise in UE4 I am open to learning other programs that may foster an animating workflow better while still maintaining the quality that UE4 provides, for example I have looked a bit at Unity 5 (hopefully I don’t get burnt at the stake for mentioning that) and that seems to be able to achieve a similar level of fidelity that I’m looking for.

Thanks,

-Rowan

2

If you used UDK, you’ll find that Matinee is largely the same in Unreal 4.
This video’s quite helpful, from what I’ve seen.
Just a case of placing cameras, and setting up the matinee timeline. Even putting in an animating characters is very simple, just make new tracks for your Skeletal meshes like you would with a camera.

3

Holy cow, thanks man. Great link. I guess my only other question would be if there’s a way to render slightly slower than realtime for the trade of slightly better quality. I’m guessing I wont need to though,
My specs are:
GTX 760 4gb Edition
i7 950
12gb of Ram

4

I’ll give your thread a bump, but sadly I can’t really help you there. I’m relatively new to the software myself! Do you mean render at a slower framerate?