
The Big Real Virtual Production Film Academy
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Production Team:
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Anna Koksharova

The Wulver
Splitting the Tasks
James and I have worked on Projects before and we knew what we would be able to cover each others weak areas very well. The roles were split into:
Timon:
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Previs
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Rigging
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MoCap Clean Up
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Planet Shader & Propellant VFX
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UE Sequence/ Shot Set
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Minor Compositing
James
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Lighting
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Rendering
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VFX
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Modelling
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Astartes Space Ship Insides
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Texture Remastering
Sequence & Shot Set Ups
Another Task for me was to get the Rig and Animations working in Unreal. This wasn't a huge deal since I have done this before.
After this it was my duty to set up all the scenes and shots in Unreal. At this point, the Previs (Below) was immensely helpful and I was able to focus on the quality of cinematography instead of needing to figure things out on the go! Once set up it was handed to James for Lighting and Rendering.

Motion Capturing
The Motion Caputing was done in the ViPRE Studio at Abertay University. It's a Vicon setup with Infared Markers and 12 tracking cameras. Retarget & Clean up of the animation was done in Maya, and finally exported into Unreal Engine 5.
Retargeting
First, the MoCap Data had to be retargeted to the Rig. This had some challenges, and some of the axes had to be manually inverted as Vicon as a different Axis orientation as Maya. The Retargeting was set up in HumanIK (Definition, etc.)
Animation Clean Up
Once all the Animations were applied on the Space Marine Rig, the Clean Up Process could be started. First, all the Motion Capture Issues had to be resolved. This includes Missing Keyframes, spikes in data, and many more. After that, I used a mixture of Constraing and Multiple Animation Layers to adjust Animations to the different Body proportions of the Astartes. This mostly concerned the feet sticking to the floor, and the Astarted handling the Bolter (Gun)
Rigging
The Model was rigged, but didn't meet my expectations for the project. So the rig was completely redone and skinned. This was done in Maya with the help of tools like NG Skintools and Advanced Skeleton.
The rig works well in Unreal. All the retargeting was set up and done in Maya
Previs
After some very rough Storyboards of me and James we settled on a story. At this point, I started to develop a rough previs for the sequence in Maya. This got more and more refined throughout the process.
