PlagueWise: The King's Evil Teaser Trailer
The Process
This started with a game idea, then a game demo, eventually turning into a fully-fledged game idea currently in progress by me. While this was my senior capstone project for college, I took the idea and ran with it, wanting to develop the atmosphere and feeling of the game, encapsulated by a short cinematic. The cinematic took roughly 3 months to create, the longest parts being the learning portions (like texturing).
I first started by taking my game demo, and re-modeling the main character, Percival. The character seen in the trailer is the 3rd iteration of the character design, he's essentially missing all of his tertiary features, like the backpack, chains, and his overcoat. All of the modeling done in blender, then imported into Adobe's Substance Painter 3D for the textures. Assets like the grass, trees, and rockface are all free assets pulled from the Fab.com library, animations from Mixamo.com, and the VFX also from Fab.com.
What took the longest for me was really learning how to use Substance Painter, and the Sequencer for Unreal Engine 5. My First thought was to actually make the character playable and to just make a machinima-style animation, but thinking back on that idea, I realized I wouldn't have been able to finish the film. The texturing process was frustrating. I would create the model, then import it to add texture, the first run I had, I forgot to enable back-face culling in Blender, so going to Substance Painter, the model looked horrendous. The second model didn't have an issue with any back-faces, but the UVs were awful, causing the textures to blend in weird spots, like adding texture to the hood also put textures on the gloves. Going back into Blender to fix it all, I finally managed to create a model that worked great in the texturing suite.
Unfortunately, the problems kept coming. Adding animations to the model only revealed more issues, especially with the weights. Although I used Mixamo, and the model was auto-rigged, certain parts of the model looked worse than everything else, sticking out for every animation.