Pied Piper

 

This group project, with Kathryn Rhine and Ryan B., is the Pied Piper project, this was the longest project I worked on, going on for 6 months in 2020. This project was a test of my abilities of motion capture, and my abilities to learn new software. The goal of this was to take a story, the story of the Pied Piper, and create an animation of the story, using Motion Capture to animate the characters.




During this project, we all divvied up the roles so we were all doing something during each of the phases, we all planned the the shots, drew up, recorded together, and cleaned up the data by splitting up the different animations to each person equally


The first part of this project was deciding what we wanted to do, by first each of us coming up with 2-3 ideas each, and deciding from there what we wanted to do. while there were some ideas, we ended up deciding to base our animation off of an old fairy tell, the Pied Piper, due to it's recognizability.


The next part was coming up with shots, in which we all took some sticky notes and drew our own shots for the scene. After we drew them we came back together and put together which shots we want in the overall scene.


When we were done with that we got together and planned out the individual animations and recorded them, using the Optitrack system to record the movements we needed. We then divided the the recorded movements in order to clean up the marker data at a quicker pace.


After that, we grabbed the models we needed from Mixamo a site with free models for use. We then took the recorded, cleaned up, data and applied them to the models from Mixamo in MotionBuilder.


The next part was the final, hardest, and longest part, putting everything into The Unreal Engine for the final animation. What we did was started off finding models for buildings, roads, trees and other environmental stuff and learned on our own about using the Unreal Engine, by applying these static objects into Unreal and modifying them to get what we wanted from them.

We then took the models and scenes and put them together into a shared scene, and started to get the models and animations into the scene as well, in which we taught ourselves how to apply the animations, how to use Unreal's camera, and to create other aspects for the scene.

After we finished all of that, we used the camera to create recordings of the shots, edited certain parts out, then Katheryn put everything together into the final animation.


Ultimately this project was a strong test of what we new, and on how we can teach ourselves how to use certain and unfamiliar software. We had some problems figuring stuff out in the beginning, but the real difficulty came by in March, when the pandemic started, so we all had to figure out how to use the Unreal Engine on our own, using our personal computers and home situation, and to keep in contact with each other. We were able to get by this by using discord to have meetings and to ask each other questions when we needed to. As a final note, this was still a fun project to work on, that taught me that there is still a lot I need to learn


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