For this week’s assignment, I continued working with the Daz avatar I had created during the first week. I ended up practicing the workflow I discovered last week around mapping a Mixamo animation onto a Daz character’s skeleton, by bringing in 3 more animations for my character into Unreal.
Instead of using the pre-existing Unreal third person character, I set up mine to start by being still, and gradually increase its speed (which is connected to a blend space with 3 animations: still, walking, running) over the course of a few minutes. I’ve also added a key event for the character to jump when I press ‘Q’.
In addition to last week’s single camera view, I’ve expanded the scene to include 3 cameras which show close-ups of different body parts or angles of the character, and as well as a wide shot, all following the avatar as it’s walking. I’m beginning to find close-ups fascinating in this context, as they reveal how artificial everything is in an almost innocent manner. This especially applies to the foot (whose skeleton is still slightly wrongly mapped.)
I used Bolero as a soundtrack for the character’s journey to nowhere, as it’s a highly repetitive composition which I found matches the way my avatar is stuck in a loop with the four animations it knows how to do. I live-performed changing the cameras and making my character jump to the sound, trying to create a bit of a sense of rhythm. The video is definitely half-baked. First of all, the environment is almost empty, so it’s almost impossible to tell that the character is moving through space. The wide shot doesn’t really work, and I think I should have significantly more close-ups of different body parts to loop through. But there might be some things in it that I could see taking further.
My main question for the week is how I could edit with sound in the Sequencer, but I think the answer might just be a Google search away :).