Summer, Week 1: From Dim to Dark

This was the first week of my intended 8 weeks of summer production, and of course, nothing went as planned. Sunday night as 10PM we lost all internet services until Tuesday at 6PM. This made research, accessing my remote work station, and even signing in to Unreal Engine, all impossible. Additionally to this, A personal emergency has me leaving the state Friday. In spite of these major complications, I still managed to make a lot of progress.

My main goal for this summer is to provide my team an efficient and usable project space so that each individual can focus on their skillsets and production tasks without worrying about the framework or technicalities. I have broken this down into three general catagories: Set Building, Camera Sequencing, and Production Management.

Set Building for Dim

This week I tasked myself with creating a basic layout for the newly updated setting of our short film.

The setting consists of a simple circus environment, with what we have named the 'dungeon' set underneath the stage.

I prioritized the dungeon set as it has a majority of the screen time, and left the circus set (left) very simple. The dungeon set is a room underneath the stage of the circus, where workers are having the color drained from them, the same colors the Ringmaster uses in his famous show. I wanted to flesh out the Stairs and the Capstan because they should be seeing the most character interaction out of any static meshes in the environment.

I continued onto some light set dressing, building bed nooks into the walls and creating pipes that snaked around the room. My main priority was to block out the sets just enough that I could start bringing cameras into the scene and have context for the shots. At first creating the pipes seemed like it would take a while, but I was able use Maya's Sweep Mesh tool and cut the modeling time to a fraction of what it typically would have been.

Camera Sequencing

Last semester we ended up with a 2D Animatic that accurately represented our story ideas, so the next step is to begin converting that into a 3D space. I researched Unreal Engine 5's Camera sequencers, and while I learned about them, I used Sync Sketch to separate our animatic into a set of sequences and noted the frame range of each sequence. While I was in SyncSketch I revised some of the camera positioning in our animatic to work towards more dynamic cinematography. I created my first sequence in Unreal Engine and blocked out the camera movements of our first sequence in the 2D animatic, so that I could begin experimenting with the sequencer and its sub tools. I found that the best workflow for our film will be to create a 'Sequence' to group camera shots, and then create a 'Master Sequence' to compile the individual sequences together. This creates a organized hierarchy for our team's editor to use when we need to make adjustments or polish shots/sequences. I made two other small discoveries while working with cameras in UE5. Firstly, I found that the backsides of meshes is invisible to the camera, this seems obvious and uninteresting at first look, but most of the walls I had created were planes, rather than geometry with thickness, meaning my cameras could look into the scenes through the 'invisible' sides of the walls, but everything inside the sets is still visible and contained. This works extremely well for our two sets as they are both indoor sets and it allows much more camera movement freedom. Secondly, I found that there is a parameter I can toggle in UE5 for Cameras called "Spawnable". In short, when enabled, The camera is toggled to a Spawnable Camera, and Is only referenced inside the Camera Sequencer, rather than being referenced by the Project's Level/World. What that means for our production, is we can file the cameras away into the hierarchy of the Sequencer system, so that even with hundreds of cameras in play, we will only be seeing and loading in the cameras relevant to the sequence we are working on. It is a simple tool but it would be a very disorganized project space without it.

Production Management

The rest of my team had loosely mentioned work they were hoping to get done over this summer, but there hadn't been any communication or updates from anyone for the past couple months so I wanted to try to subtly foster some engagement from the team. I sent out a message to everyone individually and asked what they were hoping on accomplishing over the summer, if anything. Once I had gotten a response from everybody I compiled them into a small team announcement to let everyone know what the general goals are for the summer, and I posted a few questions and updates of my own. It seemed to be pretty effective, because our team has engaged with each other this week more than they had since the semester ended. I additionally met up with my professor to get some insight on Unreal Engine's Camera Sequencer and a few specific aspects of the software I was having trouble with, and we were able to talk through most of the issues.

The other major project management task I undertook was converting our Maya projects to Unreal Engine, and creating a project space in the college's shared drive so that the updated versions of the project would be accessible to everyone. I started by downloading a few projects off the Unreal Engine Marketplace to get a good sense of what professional file structures look like in UE5. I copied down the structure I saw repeated the most and adjusted it to accommodate for specifics of our project. I then transferred my modeling projects from Maya and the Dim Project from UE5 onto a cloud drive, and then onto the college shared drive, so that they were accessible to the team and ready for next semester. Lastly I transferred my sets from Maya to UE5 and the framework of the project is relatively in place.

Overall I am really happy with the amount of progress I was able to make this week, as I have 7 more weeks ahead of me and this one had been cut nearly in half. Over next week I want to establish a Master Material for our project space, as well as blocking out another 1.5k frames in the sequencer. I want to continue building up the models in the sets and add some set dressing with props and clutter. If possible I would like to sculpt out a few metal panels and a few wooden planks that I could use on the walls and stairs, and I'd like to model the lightbulbs and cords.