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Moving Meditations
Over the summer I wanted to keep practicing and learning about Unreal Engine 5, so I entered a 3D artist competition called the Moving Meditations Challenge. There was still a lot for me to learn, but for this project specifically, I wanted to tackle lighting and building out a scene.
Even though the camera and animation were already provided by the challenge, I still had to retarget the motion capture animation for the 3D character that I wanted brought in from Mixamo.
My first two challenges were learning about retargeting with IKRigs and trying to create a subway with only the assets I could find in Quixel Bridge.
After blocking out a rough look for my subway station, I began to keep refining the space. Adding graffiti, adding imperfections like dirt to the textures, and modifying the post-process volume for a better-looking atmosphere.
I also got the idea to add a bit of color transformation at a certain point of the animation like he's entering the spirit realm or something.
After getting the whole "Spirit Realm" idea, I decided that I wanted to add some spirits. These doodles I quickly drew in Clip Studio and brought them into the scene and added some keyframe animations. I tried to vary the animations between the fish, but I'm not a keyframe animator, so it's nothing amazing.
Conclusion
This project forced me to learn a lot in a short amount of time since the competition lasted only a month. I watched many tutorials and played around with a lot of things, which ultimately was a really rewarding experience as I accelerated my understanding of Unreal Engine 5 from my previous project, which was more focused on simply just telling a good story.
I definitely want to participate in more similar projects in the future and just continue to explore the possibilities of what I can create with Unreal Engine 5!
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