Final year project - your opinions

LeeMeredith

Hello I'm moving into the final year of University and will have two modules dedicated to two projects, one is a portfolio piece and one is a project for example setting up my animations in ue4. Not many details have made it to us yet but I'm considering creating a boss fight in ue4, with all the animations (either first or third person for player) created by me and then implemented and setup in ue4 by me.

My lecturer said I could do that but I have limited ue4 knowledge and only 24 weeks, do you guys think it's possible? Last time I tried setting up blueprints in Ue4 all I could find was unanswered questions and very few tutorials. I've seen each previous year before me and they all do insane amounts and end up with sub-par results and I want to break that trend.

I'm open to suggestions for any project you think would be suitable for the time frame, I was also thinking of interactive death animations (like Doom) or setting up a parkour style locomotion system.

Also what I create will be showcased at the end of University to potential employers, which is why I'm trying to do something that will impress.

Thanks for any replies.

Rmunday

I reckon the simplest within the time frame would be the Parkour system, there are plenty of tutorials regarding triggering climbs, falls and so on. It would be a large amount of motion graph work.

Interactive deaths would be sweet as well, it would show your skills and imagination off, never implemented something like that myself in Unreal however once again I believe there are a fair few tutorials on triggering such an event. I believe the hardest part of those is ensuring both the player animation and enemy animation sync up correctly, weird stuff can happen which can sometimes be a pain to troubleshoot.

My experience with unreal is also very basic however blueprints was pretty easy to pick up to do what I needed, everything has handy tooltips and the Unreal forums have some good documentation highlighting the main nodes and what they can be used for. I think the best idea since your marks depend on this been awesome is make a focused but highly polished system, a boss fight would be cool however you then have to think about AI, path finding/nav meshes, all that as well as troubleshooting time. Sometimes things work awesome first time other times a huge issue can occur from the smallest of problems such as an export problem.

Keep this thread updated will be cool to see the progress you make! 

LeeMeredith

Hey @Rmunday  I spoke with a lecturer and I don't have to use ue4 for my project, I can just do two different animations which may be better. I think having animations setup in UE4 would be pretty cool but I'm just not skilled enough to complete animations and set it up in ue4 in 24 weeks.

For the two animations I'm thinking of a creature and human interaction, wherever it be a fight or friendly interaction and a scene focusing heavily on body mechanics. None of this is finalized I assume we'll have a discussion in September, not many details have been released yet.

Rmunday

Well how about do the interaction, set it up to be rendered and if you have the time at the end attempt to get it in engine? Not sure how UE4 handles it but I have recently started a guy in a Mech for a project using Unity. I rigged the pilot and the Mech separate but within Maya parented the pilot to the inside of the Mech. Then I exported them firstly separately, parented a joint on the pilot to the Mech in engine so it follows the Root of the Mech and then have the animations sync up via animation graphs. I then went ahead and tried it as treat each separate part, the pilot and the Mech as one character in engine as in I animated them the usual way in Maya, baked the animation but then exported them both together so once it is dragged into Unity the animations are the exact same as they are within Maya & it is treated as one Mesh but 2 separate rigs. The limit to this is you can't have 2 separate Anim graphs for each character, it is all treated under one Graph.

Not saying it would work for you but if you animate the interaction, bake the keys onto the skeletons and then export the entire scene together then when you hit play the sequence SHOULD play out  exactly as you expect then you can do some camera work in engine. Take what I am saying with a grain of salt as I haven't used UE4 for a while.

LeeMeredith

Well I think at the end of semester 1 we are tasked with improving it or adding to the project, so if my animations are in a decent shape I can possibly add them to the engine.

Thanks for the help Rmunday