Unreal Challenge: Furious Elegance | The Secret of the Mask

[xuguangjia]

Title: The Secret of the Mask

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghr2dtdYkBA

Student Submission: Yes

Credits to sourced content:

• Megascans Trees: European Black Alder
• Brushify - Forest Pack
• Brushify - Natural Roads Pack
• uDraper Real-Time Cloth Simulation Plugin and 3D Clothes Designer
• PBRMAX library assets: Skull, Stone Bridge
• Metahuman Creator
• Music Stream Furious Drumbeat by Yiran | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
• Quixel Bridge Assets
• Sketchfab Assets: “Mask” (Mask - Download Free 3D model by Muru [c5ad926] - Sketchfab) by Muru is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International | Creative Commons).
  “bug” (bug - Download Free 3D model by dansekampkunst [0c24cdd] - Sketchfab) by dansekampkunst is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International | Creative Commons).
  “Spider” (Spider - Download Free 3D model by chrismartin1337 [3804fb5] - Sketchfab) by chrismartin1337 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International | Creative Commons).

Screenshot of project in-editor:

Optional

• Description
  The action references in this animation come from the Kung Fu movie Ip Man. Originally, I wanted to use AI motion capture technology to reproduce the Wing Chun combat style, but I found that a single camera angle couldn’t accurately recreate the Wing Chun stances. Therefore, I adopted the traditional animation production method and manually created keyframes while referencing the movie. I planned to create three rounds of combat, but due to time constraints, I only managed to complete one round. The 850 frames of combat in the film were entirely completed by manually creating keyframes. I hope everyone will enjoy it.

• Engine version
  UE5.1

[MixtapeRomeo]

Bravo! This turned out excellent. I was impressed after my first view, and THEN read that you manually keyed everything. Impressive!

[xuguangjia]

So glad you like it! Actually, I tried to make the animation using Deepmotion first but since the camera only had one viewpoint and lacked depth inf, the pose in many unseen areas were incorrect. The most important thing about Kung Fu is that evey pose needs to be the right position, so I eneded up manually creating keyframes. It proves our brains are still better than AI sometimes

[MixtapeRomeo]

I could totally see the lack of depth causing major issues for these kinds of animations. Glad you were able to find a way around it and still come out with a killer animation! It turned out great.

[xuguangjia]

Forget mention that the animation is created with iClone