For questions relating to the current active challenge please use the tag UnrealChallenge
For submissions please include the tag BetterLightThanNever
Darkness:
Student Submission: (No)
Credits to sourced content:
- All materials and meshes are sourced from the Quixel Megascans Library
- Character is a custom metahuman
Description
- This is a cinematic project I have created for the challenge. Part of the challenge (pardon the pun) was getting all the editing, color grade and post processing done in camera in Sequencer. Because of the limitation I actually learned quite a lot about setting spawnables in sequencer, using master sequences and post processing with the cinecamera actor and the post process volume. Also the tips from the kickoff stream were super helpful as well.
- Engine version 5.0.2
Process
- With the challenge theme in mind, I started with a few different concept drawings.
Then from the drawings, I thought about what the character would be thinking. Then wrote some words that might be going through his mind. I wrote multiple versions of this poem until I was satisfied that it was somehow relatable to the theme. Then I found out about the sound not being a criteria… 
I built a small environment. A clearing with all sides surrounded by cliffs. I made two different lighting situation for this one area. First one being foggy and very dimly lit with a moon and the second being a rising sun.
The first big thing was to see if my concept was going to work with the challenge limitations. I had three different lighting situations in one area and one shot was in a different location and was going to be intercut with other shots in the main location. Thankfully by using master sequences and spawnables, all this was possible in a user friendly way. Or shall I say, blueprint noob way.
I made a few different Niagara systems, primarily using the mesh location and curl noise to drive the animation. I highly recommend CGShow on Youtube for Niagara tutorials. These two are basically the same animation with a different material applied. I made the yellow one spin a bit faster.
I recorded some attractive facial expressions of mine via livelink app and take recorder. However I couldn’t get the head rotation to work for some reason and I manually animated the head rotation by control rig. Also the face animation was cleaned up with face control rig.
I built a long tunnel starting at the other end of the map for that one other shot. So when the camera goes through the tunnel and out the other side, it leads to the clearing where the main character is meditating. The tunnel had to be dark but not pitch black obviously. I added a big rect light at one end and left holes along the route and threw some spot lights at the holes to add some detail along the way. The idea was that the light is changing color as you come through the tunnel so the spot light temperatures were varied accordingly.
After the building most of what was needed, I started composing each separate shot in sequencer. I made sure to make all the lights, particles and some objects spawnables to each sequence so that they don’t end up in the wrong shot.
2.39:1 aspect ratio, standard UE film grain, some custom color grade settings, a post process material for barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, vignette, lens flare and lens dirt mask. All these settings were either setup in the cine-camera actor in sequencer or the post process volume. In all of these settings, I only really had to adjust the lens flare and dirt mask settings for different lighting scenarios. I highly recommend looking up Alec Tucker’s blog post on Artstation about these if you are interested.
After I was happy with the lighting (am I?
), and the separate sequences, I made a master sequence. From here it was just a matter of finding the right timing for each cut and sometimes going back to the individual sequence to make adjustments.
After that, there was a lot of vaping to torture my vocal cords, some cringe voice acting. Some sound design work in Premiere and I was done. Thank you for letting us add sound in post btw, it was driving me crazy to figure out how to export sound together in MRQ. Although… I know … sound isn’t a criteria.
TLDR : Sound isn’t a criteria but you are allowed to add it anyway 
