Unreal Engine Fight Sequence

After learning the basics of Virtual Production this semester, I wanted to continue experimenting with creating different types of scenes using Unreal Engine (UE4). For this project, I wanted to practice using animations from Mixamo and experiment with Unreal Engine's recently released Metahuman demo.

Character & Animation Assets

The character model and animation assets for the project were all imported from Mixamo, which is compatible for import into UE4. I collected a variety of fighting animations while choreographing the fight scene in my head.

MetaHuman

Using the MetaHuman creator demo file recently released by Unreal Engine, I created a modified face for the character, then used the Live Link Face app to capture my own facial expressions to animate the face.

Scene building & Camera

With the character model and animations in place, I went into UE4 and built an environment for the scene.

The most time consuming part of the process is animating and keyframing the position of the characters. Even with the animation assets from Mixamo, it was necessary to keyframe the movement of the characters so their position remain consistent between animations.

Once the scene is animated, it was time to place the cameras into the project to capture the scene. With my experience shooting fight sequences in real life, it was quite intuitive to setup the camera angles in UE4; the virtual nature of the production also allowed me to conveniently explore different camera angles than in real life where one have to physically block out the scene and change settings on the camera.

Once everything is done in UE4, the project is exported into several image sequences to be edited in Adobe Premiere.

Final Video: