Inspiration
The inspiration and direction for this project were established during last semester’s UE cabin project. First, I wanted to continue developing the cabin scene I had previously created. Second, I didn’t want to waste the stunning reflections created by the unique salt lake terrain. Therefore, I added a storyline to rationalize the scene: a man, rushing to make it to his anniversary date with his wife, drives his car into the salt lake.
In my previous cabin project, I struggled to achieve a calm and reflective water surface effect for the salt lake. Instead, I resorted to using a flat plane to simulate the reflection, which resulted in the loss of the lake’s unique textures and details.
However, with the help of a friend, I discovered a suitable terrain material that not only preserves the reflections but also retains the distinct texture of the salt lake. This discovery has been crucial for the smooth progression of this project.
Modelling&Landscape
Since the model continued to use the cabin project’s original design, I created a simple road in the terrain to serve as a transition between the city and the salt lake scenes. For the environment, the focus is more on creating the overall sky atmosphere. I aim to capture the feeling of “golden hour” when the clouds in the sky turn into pink, fiery hues.
Vehicle&Character Animation
In this short film, there is a brief climax where I need a relatively realistic car animation. I believe that using keyframe animation alone cannot achieve the effect I’m aiming for. Additionally, I’ve included some character animations in the film. Due to my technical limitations and for the sake of convenience, I divided the car animation into two different systems.
The first system focuses on the vehicle’s movements, such as the rotation of the tires and steering direction. Following a tutorial, I built a car movement system in UE, which allowed me to control the car like in a game and record its motion. I could then create cameras to capture the desired sequences.
The second system doesn’t require showing the car’s movement—I simply keyframe the position of the car’s static mesh and attach the character to it, allowing me to focus solely on the character’s facial animation. For the character’s face, I used a MetaHuman asset, which stands out due to its ability to work with Live Link Face and UE5 for real-time facial expression capture. This feature has saved me a significant amount of time in creating detailed facial animations.
I also created a transparent material and used vertex painting to remove the animated character’s head, replacing it with a MetaHuman face that supports facial motion capture. This approach allowed me to seamlessly integrate the real-time facial performance with the character’s body animation.
Finally, I created several props to support the storytelling, such as a bouquet of flowers with an “Happy Anniversary” card and a phone with a green screen for replacing the navigation display in Nuke. I also used Nuke to add some camera shake effects to enhance the dynamic feel of certain shots.