With postproduction completed the only thing left to do is for me to publish my cutscene, and reflect on the assignment.
Final Video:
This is my final rendered cutscene video;
One Drive Link: VFX Cutscene Video
Reflection:
Personally I am quite pleased with the overall project. I am happy with the composition of my created scene and the visual effects I have captured within the video.
I enjoy working and using Unreal and it was interesting to get to use the Niagara particle systems to create the VFX within the game world. Whilst I have created particle systems before in Unreal 4 and did a little work with them in Unreal 5 for environment design. It was nice to look at the systems in much more depth and experiment with them. I did copy some of these over into my level design project, As both projects came from the same concept and follow the same narrative. And whilst I didn’t manage to add in all of the proposed particle systems and effects to the sequence I believe that the ones that are shown are of a high quality and work well in the sequence to help portray the narrative within the scene.
Whilst working I have constantly had feedback to help improve the systems I added and the scene I created. I believe this has helped me to create an environment I am happy with and fits the original aims and concept I wanted to create.
Using camera’s and editing in After Effect was interesting took a little longer than I first anticipated but, I did take my time with it some that I could properly understand what I was working with so I could properly create what I wanted. Also being able to add SFX’s and music to a scene I had created shots for was quite new for me in Unreal, I now know how I can use the in engine editing tools to create a great visual scene without the use of external software.
Possible Improvements:
Whilst I am generally pleased with the outcome, I would have liked to add some addition features to the sequence if I had more time.
- Falling Books Animation – This is something I did originally add to my concept but wasn’t made within Unreal. I know that I could simply set up a trigger within the video sequence to trigger some of the static mesh books to have physics and fall over to scatter on the floor. However I decided to focus on the effects I already had and tweaking them to fit and work within the scene and making sure they all worked properly.
- Footsteps and creaking wood SFX – This is something I debated doing when adding audio to the my sequences. I thought It would work very well with the camera shake I added to mimic character movement to give the main sequence another level of immersion. I did decide against it though as I just wanted the camera shake to be subtle and the backing music I downloaded to add depth to the sequence. With footsteps overlapping the other sounds it might be too much in some areas.
- Potential Character Rig – When concepting I did have a thought that the final shot before it fades to black would be of a character, Possibly the one I would be making for 3D character design. I did decide thought that this would mean I have to look at quickly adding a skeleton and rigging animations to that character. I didn’t go with this Idea as I felt that the first person camera shots would work better.
- Voice Over – Something I thought of whilst looking into audio tracks. I thought with the sequence being a cutscene, I could add a voice over to give some narrative elements to the sequence. I could have the character portray some emotion or intrigue at the particle effects as well as have some lines about why they are here, and what they are here to do. It might have added something to the scene, but I am happy with the scene and composition of the items giving the narrative.