Raise An Animation - UE5 FILM
Unreal Engine 5, 2022
Credit: Independent Project
Synopsis
An Unreal Engine 5 rendered animation about animation itself. Using different Unreal Engine Materials to recreate different styles of animations (stop motion, hand drawing, chinese ink, comic style, AI drawing).
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NIGHT OCEAN CITY
Unreal Engine 4, Oculus VR, 2022
Credit: Independent Project
Exhibition: CalArts Expo 2022
Synopsis
A 360-degree UE4-rendered immersive environmental experience. Please enter my dream: night ocean city.
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AWAKEN - UNREAL ENGINE ANI DEMO+MAKING
45 secs Ani Demo, 100% rendered in Unreal Engine 4
1min 40 sec Making, 2021
Credit: Independent Project
Synopsis
An animation demo mainly testing the Unreal Engine Cinematic working process & Developing Maya Python Tools to speed up this process.
Character Making
I retopologized my previous ZBrush work, 'Self-portrait (2020)' and to achieve a realistic style in the whole film and take advantage of the real-time rendering, I decided to make wings with XGen simulated feathers. To reduce the workload on XGen guides grooming, I developed a Maya Python Script, 'Feather Tool', to quickly create XGen feather for the wings.
Character Rigging
For easily exporting to UE4 and applying mocap data, the skeleton needs to be separated from the controller system and the UE4 skeletal mesh has special requirements for the joint hierarchy, so I chose to create my own rig rather than using automatic rigging tools. To speed up the working process, I developed a 'Rig Tool Sets', which helped me with my rigging, skinning, and animating.
Character Animating
Due to the pandemic, I am not able to access the mocap studio in our school so I used Microsoft Kinect with Brekel Body v2 to do the motion capture at home, which doesn't have the accuracy as good as the OptiTrack so it brought a lot of workloads to the mocap data cleanup process in MotionBuilder. The mocap data then went back to the character rig in Maya for further adjustment.
Export to Unreal Engine 4
When I was exporting 3D assets from Maya to UE4 and re-organizing them in UE4, the pivot problem often occurred and UE4 is sometimes sensitive to the transformation offset. To quickly re-locate the pivots of those assets in Maya, I developed a 'Pivot Movement Tool'.
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INTRODUCING ISCREEN PRO
2 minute 57 secs, 3D Animation, Maya(VRay), 2021
Credit: Independent Project
Synopsis
A fictional old commercial promoting a digital mask called ‘iScreen Pro’ implies people’s insane life under the worldwide pandemic.
Screening:
NFFTY (National Film Festival for Talented Youth), 2022 Women's Comedy Film Festival in Atlanta, 2022
ANIMA, Córdoba International Animation Festival, 2021
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Escape Game
Unity VR Installation, 2019
Credit: Independent Project
‘Escape Game’ is a VR project that visualized a philosophical story ‘Plato’s allegory of the cave’ to represent how people today are passively spoon-fed virtual ‘reality’ from new media.
Escape Game Introduction Video (2019)
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Character Animation Problem-solving:
To Remember A Friend (Working in progress)
Unity VR Project, 2021
Credit: Technical Consultation, Character Modeler
Synopsis
It is a collaborative Unity VR project. I'm responsible for character modeling and working with the rigger and the mocap animator to solve problems in character animation making.
Ani Problem-solving: From Mocap Retargeting/Name Definition & Joint Orientation
The director asked me about the problem that happened after the mocap animation is applied. I contacted the mocap animator and found out that rigger's joint naming caused misunderstanding, which lead to the wrong joint definition. I also collaborated with the rigger to correct some rigging and skinning issues to improve character's skin deformation.
Ani Problem-solving: From Modeling
The rigger emailed me about finding a hole that appeared after the model was rigged and put in Unity. I figured out that the problem was caused by the polygon.
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HUMAN INGREDIENTS
4 minute 15 secs, 3D Animation, 2019
Credit: Independent Project
Synopsis
This a 3D animation that presents we born in random but with the same red blood. It is to discuss people’s bias and discrimination against different races, genders and sexual orientations.
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HELLO, WORLD
4 minute 25 secs, 3D Animation, 2019
Credit: Independent Project
Synopsis
This is a 3D animation that intends to discuss the relationship between new media, people and the real world. The title ‘Hello, World’ is a sentence by tradition often used illustrate to beginners the most basic syntax of a programming language (Langbridge, 2013).
Idea Description
The project is inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave in which prisoners chained from birth in an underground chamber interpret the shadow they see on the wall is the whole of reality. For many years, human beings lived in the dark ‘cave’...
