My final draft project is about a man who gets lost in a cave and encounters monsters. I wanted to try to create such a theme as I am more into sci-fi games. The whole project was created in Maya and UE5.

Scenography

First I wanted to build a Cave with a deep pit from UE5. So I started by building a simple frame from MAYA.

I then imported the model into UE5

In UE5 I found some stone materials and some stone models and decorations that I had made myself and placed these stones in a simple model. Once the rocks were placed the whole model was roughly finished. After that I added the appropriate lighting and the first scene was completed.

In terms of effects, to make the whole environment appear more realistic I looked on youtube about making snowflakes and smoke effects. I studied the tutorial to create the particle snow and smoke to make my own effect.

Then learn to make snow materials online

Because the scene has scenes of oil lamps, I also found how to make the flames on youtube.

All the preparatory work for the first scene has thus been completed.

Character design

As I wanted to have a monster element in my scene, I wanted to sculpt a European dragon shaped monster using Zbrush. Firstly I created a round polygon to give the shape of the dragon a rough shape.

Afterwards, I separated the upper jaw, jaw, and horns of the dragon and prepared to refine them one by one.

I then began to tweak and refine the tap, adding more musculature and other details to make the whole tap more realistic and aesthetically pleasing.

After completing the musculature and skeletal structure, I re-sculpted the dragon’s teeth and added a lot of texture.

I added a pair of fins and some horns for decoration to make the whole dragon even richer, and so the whole dragon is now complete. The next step is to start applying the material to the dragon.

Since Zbrush has so many faces, I started unfolding the UVs in Zbrush, which I did using the plug-in UV Master that comes with Zbrush. The unfolding smoothed out some of the UVs to give a more even overall look.

• After the UV was unfolded, I found the dragon scale material online and painted the material in Substance Painter.

For the eye material I used a French material to give a more spirited expression to Zeheng’s eyes.

The finished textures were then placed in UE5. Since UE5 needs to create its own material requests, I created the material requests for each part first.

This completes the model of the dragon

I then found a YouTube tutorial on how to bind bones and controllers in UE5. Following the tutorial, I finished binding my character model as well. Here’s how to start the animation.

animation

For the animation part, I mainly used UE5’s animation sequences for the production. I animated two main types of animation, camera animation and character animation. k-frames took me quite a lot of time.

Once the animation was complete, I studied the engine online for high quality rendering. I rendered the animations all to EXR sequence frames and then put them into PR for editing, dubbing and colour grading. The final product is my finished animation.