Wylder: Production Dairy 05

Welcome to week five of our Wylder Production Diary!

To recap, we are making a short film based on the wonderful children’s book Wylder by Maia Walczak. We started by scanning in the pages of the book and using these as a base for both the story and the look, directly into Unreal Engine. These flat illustrations became textures on 3D models as we began building the world.

For the past couple of weeks, our time has mostly been focused on modelling the characters and main environments. This week, it was time for the rigging and texturing, as well as the groom, readying up the characters for animation. The studio has been extra busy with (super secret) service projects, so we recruited some freelancers to help us out with these stages. 

It can be a tough balance trying to develop our own IP whilst also working on client projects, especially those with a fast turnaround. We have always thrived from having a pool of talented freelancers who we can call on as and when needed, in order to expand and contract as required. 

For the facial expressions, we modeled a 3D version of the 2D shapes for the eyes throughout the book. We'll use these as morph targets (also known as blend shapes) for the eyes. The mouth we rigged along with the body using bones.

We started off modelling the hair using hair cards, which looked ok, but getting it to all blend was taking too long. Instead, we opted to take advantage of the groom system in Unreal (which we've got to know extensively on a project which we can't yet talk about). The groom was made using Ornatrix. The previously modelled hair card version still came in handy as we could use it to make sure the volume was the same, and even convert some of the edges of the cards into splines which could then be used to generate the groom. We also are going to keep the card card version on in the viewport to optimise performance during animation.

Once we had given feedback and approved the groom, we performed some tests to make sure it was performing in the way we wanted. Here is one of those tests, ala Wayne’s World...

Now that we have the characters ready to go, they can begin populating the scenes in-engine. However, before animation starts we need to get through some of the key props that are interacted with. Before us, stands a week of modelling mushrooms and texturing foraging baskets.