Here is the first full episode of Morgan lives in a Rocket House!
In the time since I originally started this thread I have completed 3x 5 minute episodes and one VR episode. I’ve been itching to release something so I’ve chucked the first episode up on YouTube. I also plan on releasing the VR episode in the not too distant future (hopefully).
I’d love to know what you think!
ORIGINAL POST
Hi everyone! I’m currently developing an animated preschool series called Morgan lives in a Rocket House. I’ve always wanted to make my own TV show, and thanks to Unreal Engine, I’ve been able to put together a pipeline that makes it totally achievable!
Here’s a little 2 minute proof of concept that I made to test the pipeline:
Did everything myself including the narration, but I’ll probably hire a real narrator for the actual series (one with less of a New Zealand accent ).
A few other details:
I’m going for a stop-motion look of older BBC kids shows (things like Bob the Builder, Pingu etc) so animated most shots with a mix of 12 and 24fps. This was kinda tricky to achieve in Unreal because of how many things are based on frames (e.g. morph targets update a frame after they are supposed to). If I rendered at 12fps, or even 24fps, things would be popping all over the place, so I had to render at 48fps then pull it back to 24fps in After Effects.
Motion blur had to be added in After Effects because of the rendering at 48fps thing.
The way I draw these characters doesn’t actually work in 3D space, so I had to work out a way to have the mouth move and scale relative to the viewing angle. This was probably the most difficult thing for me to set up (being new to Unreal and blueprints), but it ended up working pretty well.
Still on 4.10 so the circle DOF looks a bit grainy.
Anyways, I hope you like it. Any feedback is more than welcome!
That’s really great! The only thing I’d say would be the housing at the top of the swing looks a little low-res in the close ups. Very small thing but if you’re looking to spin it out to a whole series you may want to look at dynamically upressing (by camera distance or something that takes FOV into account). If you’re manually adjusting detail across assets it could get painful.
Thanks! I’ve been working on the concept for about 18 months. Designing, writing, building the assets etc. The teaser itself took 5 weeks, from story through to final render, but I was writing tools, working out the animation pipeline, and learning Matinee as I went. Things are only going to get faster, so my aim is to be able to crank out 5 minute episodes in about 4 weeks, or maybe 5 (or 6) depending on how many new assets need to be created per episode (though I’m trying to keep new assets to a minimum as I write the stories).
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll definitely be uprezzing some stuff. The low-res assets are there because I initially underestimated how much data I could throw at Unreal before it started choking. I was originally trying to keep assets as low poly as possible. But now that everything is in the engine, the scenes are still running at 120fps, which is much much higher than I will ever need it to be for this project. I’ll be increasing the resolution on some of the textures too.
Ha! Thanks. I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback from the kids that have seen it, so hopefully yours like it too
Here is the first full episode of Morgan lives in a Rocket House!
In the time since I originally started this thread I have completed 3x 5 minute episodes and one VR episode. I’ve been itching to release something so I’ve chucked the first episode up on YouTube. I also plan on releasing the VR episode in the not too distant future (hopefully).
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