While preparing for the quarter, we put our efforts into making concept arts and storyboard because we think it could help both us and other faculties to get a better understanding of the story. Qin creates a 2D visual guide that helps the team to see how the scene will look like in the film. Based on that, Clare makes a 3D blockout in UE4 to test how the scene should be arranged. Clare also makes some small environment gadgets models that could be placed in the scene to help us to settle down the art direction. After discussion, we decided to go with stylized rendering as it fits our theme of magic world.
Story wise, we decided to make our character a learning magic student. She is timid but passionate about magic. She does not use magic well so she wants to borrow power from the magic ink. After the magic ink rune loses control, she tries to find solutions and finally uses her own power to eliminate the magic. The story still needs more details and iterations as we found the transition in our character happens too fast. To get a better idea of how the story should be told in the visual form, the storyboard from the prepackage is expanded to add more details and explanation.
Techwise, we test the whole process of making motion-captured animatics. Using leap motion UE4 plugins, we first generate real-time hand animation data in a recording scene and then record them into an animation sequence directly with the UE4 take recorder. One Good thing about the animation sequence we just recorded is that we can modify the animation graph frame by frame so we can manually adjust displacement in the original motion-captured data. With the modified data, we can put the hand animation anywhere anytime we want in our final animatics. To fully test the stability and robustness of this pipeline, the tech team makes a short animation clip of picking up an object from the table. The result video is smooth and easy to control so we have decided to settle our pipeline down this road.