Week 2

Sept 16, 2024 - Sept 22, 2024

On Tuesday, we pitched our projects in class (Sept 17, 2024) and got feedback from professors and mentors from the Mill.

For further improvement,

▪Emphasize the ingredients

▪Add a moment of product appreciation; make it desirable

▪Resolve the storyline more

▪Make the individual ingredients spin for the asteroid FX

On Thursday, the whole class went to XR Stage for a tour. Before that, our team discussed the story and revised the synopsis, addressing the suggestions from the mentors. The causality got much clearer and contextual and we were also able to build on the scene depicting the appreciation of the product while emphasizing the ingredients as much as we could.

During the tour, I was amazed by the technology and the power of Unreal Engine. It was interesting to see how virtual production works and obviously, I got a better understanding of it. After the tour, the excitement toward virtual production finally beat the fear of it. Yay!

Then I started working on the storyboard again.

Along with the new synopsis, the environment and FX also changed a little bit.

The desert will be our new environment and we need the telescope. For the FX part, dust simulation and projectile are required for the scene where the trail mix falls to the ground and for the meteor shower, respectively.

Based on the new storyboard, we collected more references for camera movement, timing, and FX.

Now it is finally time to get around to working on FX!

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I was assigned to create a Nut Asteroid FX. Though I had experienced Niagara System in UE, I have never done the FX which doesn't spawn the particles consistently nor fade them away, I needed to find a way to spawn a bunch of particles at once and make them linger. Besides that, I should use multiple meshes for this FX because this will eventually be a ring that consists of various nuts.

I followed these two tutorials to create the rotating particle. In the left-side tutorial, there was a part that said to use Vortex Velocity and UE removed that feature from the 5.4 version. After a couple of tests, I found another tutorial that shows the replacement of Vortex Velocity which is called Vortex Force. To make the meshes circulate, adjust the vortex force amount and origin pull amount carefully unless I want to either push the meshes out or make them a chunk.

In the beginning, I was thinking of making multiple emitter panels for each type of nuts in one Niagara System, but I ended up making an array in one emitter and adjusting the size, rotation, and pivot offset for each mesh. That way, I don't need to go back and forth between different emitter panels. In addition, since all meshes are in one emitter, it might be a little easier to fix the meshes from colliding with each other later on.

After the short meeting with teammates, I modified the mesh spawn amount and adjusted the pivot offset settings as well as the vortex force so the whole FX looks more torus shape.

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Yilin tried the meteor shower effect in Houdini and the file size got too big due to the heavy particle counts, I get to work on them directly in Unreal Engine. Also, I was allocated shooting star cluster effect for the background; Wyatt would prefer to shoot the last scene on the stage rather than compositing them later. I think they are the same effects (shooting star cluster effects = meteor shower), so technically I have one more effect to do once I'm done with asteroid FX!

Tasks to work on:

▪Asteroid FX

– Fix the mesh from colliding

– Adjust the mesh size, speed, rotation, etc. using nuts assets

▪Meteor Shower FX

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