Scene from Tuna World short film, depicting themes of loneliness in a surreal Unreal Engine world

A short film of loneliness in an unreal world.

Title	Details
Roles	Virtual Production Technologist
Tools	Unreal, Livelink, Blender
Length	2 weeks
Project	A short film of loneliness in an unreal world.
Features	Motion Capture, Virtual Production, Environmental Art, Unreal Sequencing

Demo

Story

Tuna lives in a flower right next to the curvy roads. In order to find happiness, she has to find her way back to the ocean.

assets/tuna-world/miro.png

World building

Version I

Heightmap Building

In order to build up my unreal skills, I also followed the manual for unreal from the Wolrd of Level Design (WoLD). It was super helpful! I also learned to create the height map from photoshop and imported it to Unreal. It really wowed me how unreal can be so powerful and efficient in making the visuals happen.

Left is the photoshopped map. Right is the unreal imported height map.

assets/tuna-world/heightmap.png

Version II

MotionBuilder Recap

I did several times in MotionBuilder to be familiar with the workflow. I understood that I need to delete the animation data as well as the skeleton for Roots before exporting it to fbx. In this way, I will get the normal skeleton when importing it to unreal rather than the squid shaped skeleton as below.

I had so much fun working in front of a green screen. But there are problems where when I kneel, the data through RADiCAL seems hard to analyze it. So some of the actions I recorded are not as accurate.

I wanted to work with Marvelous on Saturday but I spent the whole day working with Unreal to find better angles and create a more cohesive story. I will update the character design in terms of costume design through Marvelous design!

assets/tuna-world/motionbuilder.png