Motion Capture Week 1

Hello! Here is my homework for motion capture for this first week. I'm actually an expert in Maya since I've been using it since 2011 and have been using UE4 ever since it was UE3... so there wasn't much to learn for me yet but I did put together a cool little level just for this class, and I'll talk about what I did and what I was thinking while I was making it. I also just taught myself how to use a little html5/css and how to host on GitHub so hopefully, this blog site isn't too buggy. So I looked around on the UE4 marketplace and included Epic store stuff and found this cool little beach town that kinda reminded me of Capri or Cinque Terre in Italy that I got to visit last year. For the first shot, I wanted to focused on the camera composition and wanted to capture the setting all in one which meant getting the beach as well as some buildings. I didn't actually edit anything in this sample map for this first shot except the camera settings I think. I've been wanting to get around to making an android sometimes in 3D and was thinking of some interesting ideas for a story that might involve this sort of environment. I was thinking it would be cool to do some sort of setting where it's not quite what it seems kinda thing so I found another pack from Epic called Soul City which came with a bunch of cool looking cyberpunk like assets. For this part, I took a bunch of the assets and kitbashed them into the side of the mountain trying to keep in mind what buildings made sense and where like the walls near the water. I also had to make sure to hide as many seams as I could while keeping in mind what the camera wouldn't capture. I really wanted to go for a dystopian extremely claustrophobic slums sorta look which I thought was an interesting contrast to the tropical and peaceful looking beach town. The background giant building pieces kinda brings the rest of the environment together for me, it kinda frames the world and gives some extra epic scale to the level. I think every overcrowded city or town needs an oversized metropolis looking down on it. I think it adds a little extra story element to it as well, maybe the poor folks live in these terrible old shacks on top of each other and commute to the city while the rich folks live on the other side of the island in their fancy and spacious beachfront condos. Maybe the whole area is completely abandoned, but whatever happened in this city I just made up.

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