Final Delivery

 For final delivery I was mainly polishing up the VFX and adjusting the times to fit the final animation.

One of the first fix was changing the tornado color and adding a gradient to look more similar to our reference. I also changed the coloring in the by making and add in the mesh material instead of a multiplier. This gave better blending of the colors and more control in painting it.

Tornado color material

Tornado in engine final look

In addition I when the genie's legs appear and the tornado disappears, another smoke is create to get a better transition.

Genie's legs appear with a puff of smoke

And lastly I adjusted the puff animation to the new lamp so that once it pushed its nozzle then the smoke VFX is played.

P4V

Sprint #5 Delivery

For this sprint was continue with merging all the pieces in the engine and connecting every part. This allow to find issues with the position of the sword and easily talk with each other to fix the timing.

I initially try to connect the sword similar to what I did with the tornado by linking it to a joint that the character animation had set for the final sword position, but what getting incorrect locations and so for faster solution just use the sword location in the animation to put a fixed location. The only disadvantage of this is in case the sword is changed in the animation I would have to again change that fixed position.

Screenshot when genie grabs the sword effect in engine

Besides unifying everything was also polishing the tornado effect that was overlapping and hiding the character in the view. I modified and played around with the Initial Mesh Orientation in the Particle Spawn to be horizontal in the Z axis and in the Particle update set it to follow the particle position.

Tornado effect

Another change that I did was the timing of the tornado. Making the inner be faster that the outer. This made it more readable. Also, added a opacity mask to the inner tornado border to create some more noise and break the uniform cylinder.

Inner tornado material opacity mask

Sprint #4 Delivery

 

For this spring I dedicated most of the attention to unify all the elements in the unreal scene to start getting a sequence test.

for the next steps would be to fix the curve of the tornado effect that is following a hips socket of the genie for a smoother follow. And also link later with the animated sword to link it with the effect once.

Started with the smoke effect when she first comes out of the lamp by using both a flipbook and star materials to give it a similar look of when the genie from Aladdin first comes out.

Sprint #3 Delivery

For this sprint I worked on polishing the tornado effect and also starting with the look of her magic. This was set up in blueprint using a timeline and aligning the sword to the time of the magic effect.

A new addition to the sword effect was adding a vertex color in Houdini to add and emissive color to the inside part of the sword to highlight it more before its materialized. 

UE 5.1 using Niagara effect

My new reference for her sword is Sub Zero's ice weapons an so will give a more bright color before it fully materialize.

Working with the new brush texture map provide by my teammate, I panned it in a spline mesh with the use of dynamic parameters.

Add a random color to the magic lines

Using an dynamic parameter to control the panning of the texture inside Niagara

Polish the look of the tornado effect using the same brush texture of the magic hand. Added a curve scale in the Z axis so the tornado grows to it's final size and using the particle position of make the rotation faster or slower depending of it.

Sprint #2 Delivery

First pass of the tornado VFX. I started with using particles in Houdini as my base but after finding it so tedious, Niagara gave me better and faster results.

Tornado using Niagara

Using the mesh position to control the twirl of the tornado with curves

Sword VFX implementation inside the engine had some issues since exporting the VAT texture in Houdini needed the parameters of w, orient and pivot, which my animation did not had because it works with using the voronoi fracture point positions and normal and so in no moment did I converted it into a rigid body. My solution was to first to convert it into a rigid body dynamic and simulated the pieces falling. This generated the attributes that I needed and then I just imported the output of this as my geometry input that assembles the pieces together.

Sword in Engine with textures

Also translated the points to be to the back of the camera before they materialize together so they are hidden to what is seen in the camera.

Convert voronoi sword into RBD packed object

RBD output as geometry input for the transform pieces

Merged object of the sword mesh with the pivot, orient and w attributes needed for exporting RBD VAT

Sprint #1 Genie

For our Genie project we started by collaborating ideas on what parts each would be working, 'look & fell' of the character, references and an story board.

Milanote board with reference

This first sprint I set up our unreal project in UE5.1 with the folder structure that each of us will be needing and a scene level for testing the camera and character animation. I changed the rendering project settings by setting lumen and removing motion blur to make faster working on the project since it was getting slow when responding to changes.

Unreal Engine project folder structure

I set a first pass on the lighting on the level to test the camera sequence. Since our project focuses in the character we don't need an environment so I set an infinite wall with a darker color and 3 point lighting. so the main focus for now will only be our character while we work on the proxy. 

Started with the Genie's sword materialization in Houdini using a voronoi fracture with a distance from target node that drives the animation by using a lerp function for the appearing of it. For the movement of the pieces I use the normal information of the point and then add a displacement to their position to separate them with a attribute VOP.

Sword flipbook test

Mesh set up. Once the final mesh it just replaced in the file node

Appearing setup

Figure Drawing Portfolio