My entry into the contest is essentially my first real pubic display of my work having ony started out in 3d animation last year.

Here Goes!

Artstation Project Page - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w610PV 

There were some challenges during production which has highlighted some areas I'd like to work on and some areas which clearly need investment!

Work In progress Video 1

The first stages were spent setting up a scene in UE4. To do this I used some assets I purchased from the Unreal Marketplace and the water system that came out in 4.26. I then moved on to creating the face of my character in the Metahuman creator. I'm not a huge fan of the interface so I wanted to get this out of the way first. Particularly as I knew the standard athletic female body in CC3 would suit this character perfectly fine. I jumped in and exported an OBJ to use in Marvelous Designer where I pulled together the dress. I find MD to be a really quick way to pull together clothing. I tend to use bespoke stuff made for each character. I find it speeds up the process of getting it applied to the character later on. I can simply mask out parts of the skin likely to bleed through during movement without it looking out of proportion anywhere as the outfit is already molded to the characters body shape.

I then took the dress into Substance 3D Painter for texturing. I wanted to get a kind of classic Ibiza holiday look which was what lead me to the pattern. I can't claim to be an expert in this area so had to go with best guess! once done I applied to the character in CC£ and added the textures. I did this manually. I have looked at the pipeline addon but found the process to be in need of some closer attention as it was not as straight forward as I'd anticipated when I looked at it previously so this is on my list for review in more detail, perhaps I have overlooked something.

I wanted to do something different and while looking at dress styles I was reminded of the face paint that party goers where. I thought this would be a good way to tie together the Metahuman head and the CC3 body. I exported the textures needed from both sides and edited in Photoshop. When I viewed it back in UE4 I was pleased with the result. Once I got head and body in to UE4 It was time to move on to the most important part - The lip-Sync!

Work in Progress video 2 (Part One)

At this stage I was beginning to pull everything together in UE4. The last and most important task was to assemble the lip-sync. This proved challenging due to the source material I'd chosen. The lyrics lacked the clarity you get from straight up vocal work so the output from Acculips needed a bit more clean up than usual. That being the case Acculips remained a huge time saver. I then spent a fair bit of time running the output through live link to the Metahuman head. I think anyone that has used this workflow will know, you need to spend some time aligning the lip-sync in Iclone for the benefit of the Metahuman as they are not a like for like in the way the faces are animated. The challenge here is the same for many of us and that how powerful your graphics card is. I'm fortunate in that my 2070 super is reasonably good but we can always benefit from more. Overall I'd say this stretch was where the largest amount of dedicated time was spent.

Work in Progress Video 2 (Part 2)

During this stage there was some back and forth with the Acculips clean up. I'd finish, move on to something else, run the sequence and find myself back tweaking again. I also reorded some facial expression using an Iphone 10 and motion live. This is something I find quite challenging so I ended up doing some manual keying after.

Next I started working on a pair of shoes as I wanted it to show she had clearly been wearing night out shoes she had taken off to walk on the beach, the viewer could take from this what they wanted, either she had been out partying all night or perhaps spent the night with the person she was singing about and was walking home in the morning! At this stage I wasn't sure how much the shoes would be seen so I spent some time texturing etc anyway. As I started working on this the decision to not feature them closely was slowing being made for me as they proved fiddly to work with!

By this point I'd already prepped the character was ready to start recording animation. Graphics card limitations meant I have to do this with limited quality so as many of my peers will know it can be difficult to fully visualise the end result. I was having some trouble getting 60fps on live link so ended up really scaling down and created a blank level in UE4 where I could record the motion. I then applied that motion to my character in the UE4 sequencer. When I was ready I took three separate renders of the camera shots I wanted from start to finish to give me a bit more freedom in post production where I could piece it together while being able to see it in full quality.

It was post production in which my main issue came up. I was initially rendering from UE4 at 24fps then editing in Premier Pro and exporting the end result at 24fps. My first few attempts the head movements were really robotic and jumpy. Where as in UE4 and Iclone it was really smooth. I figured this had to be something to do with frame rate so I tried rendering from UE4 at 60fps then from Premier Pro at 24fps as I'd seen guides before suggesting it gives you a more natural finish. In the end I just went with 60fps as I didn't see much improvement. I'm not really sure what the cause is as I would have liked the motion to be a bit smoother and more natural but I think it will be something I will need to investigate further - perhaps it is some as yet unknown config in Premier Pro or perhaps those more experienced might suggest another editing suite more appropriate for this kind of work.

Overall I was happy with the lip sync as I was looking for the right blend of subtlety and clear pronunciation at the right point. At the end of the day the project was a lot of fun to work on and I'm happy taking that and the lessons learned away at the end. I may even end up finishing the entire song!