Author: Kewin Marcin Skrzekut

Overview

There’s no character in my scene, but there is a car, assumed to be self-driven, with no passengers involved.

This post discusses the rigging of the car as part of the consecutive stages of the project. While the car is the main actor in my scene, the primary objective is actually the camera movement. The car driving through the landscape serves as a reason to showcase the landscape shots and the experimental camera rotations that I’ll be implementing moving forward.

Control system – rigging of the car in UE5

My primary goal was to implement a control system that would allow me to create effective animation – a car rig. To support this, I’ve relied on YouTube tutorials as supplementary resources to reinforce class concepts.

Guiding my creative process, by prioritizing functional requirements for individual scenes to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), I was sure to get things working first before I could worry about creative direction, aestetechics, and visual qualities.

Exploring Car Mechanics and Cinematic Camera Movements

Reassessing Focus: Cars as Tools for Cinematic Exploration

After researching the topic and watching numerous YouTube tutorials, I realized that developing car mechanics is an extensive project in itself. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to this topic, often covering everything from modeling and rigging to simulating car physics for realistic movement within virtual worlds.

This, however, is not my primary area of interest. I don’t drive myself, so I can’t evaluate the accuracy of my creations based on personal experience. For me, the car is merely an asset to facilitate the development of camera movement across the scene. My primary focus lies in exploring and recreating cinematic camera movements characteristic of filmmaking.

Using City Sample Vehicles for Efficient Integration

To streamline the process, I’ve decided to use Epic Games’ City Sample Vehicles, which I sourced from the Fab platform. This approach allows me to incorporate a moving car into my scene without dedicating excessive time to car mechanics, aligning my project with its intended focus on cinematography.

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Learning from Tutorials and Class References

Rigging and Animation Insights

One tutorial I followed involved rigging a car model within Unreal Engine and creating a control rig. In this process, the car’s suspension animation was generated procedurally using a custom function. I found this tutorial both informative and practical, expanding on the knowledge I gained in class during Week 6, where rigging was a key topic.

Car rigging: ULTIMATE ONE CLICK CAR CONTROL RIG – Unreal Engine 5.4

The model of the car has been provided by the author of the tutorial via the Google Drive share link who is the content creator for both the tutorial and the car model. Contact information can be found here: postprocessed.media – Contact

The end results: blueprint class for the forward solve graph implementation for the wheel rotation, steering and body control.

Future Aesthetic Enhancements

The car’s aesthetics, such as its materials and textures, can be customized later. I plan to revisit this in a subsequent phase of the project, focusing on enhancing the visual appeal and coherence of the scene.

Spline is a very effective tool for path-making and for drawing clouds of points. These clouds do not necessarily need to take the shape of an actual cloud but can represent something less volumetric, like a road or path. I have explored the implementation of these techniques in both landscape and modelling modes. The tutorials I referred to include, but are not limited to, the following sources:

Follow a Spline and Report Distance Along It Using an Actor Component | Epic Developer Community
How to move things along a spline path – Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial

Exploring Splines, Timelines, and Lerp Functions for PCG

Timeline Function

The timeline function is equivalent to the draw function in other programming contexts. It runs repeatedly to create continuous updates.

Lerp Function

The Lerp (Linear Interpolation) function is used to interpolate between two values, A and B. For example, interpolating between the RGB values of orange and blue will produce a smooth colour transition between these two colours.

Setting Up the Blueprint Classes

Two Blueprint (BP) actor classes are required:

1. BP_Spline: Defines the pathway for the object’s movement.
2. BP_Cube: Represents the object moving along the pathway. This class contains all the logic, referencing the BP_Spline file.

The entire code is contained in the BP_Cube class, which executes the movement along the spline by referencing BP_Spline.

Code Explanation: BP_Cube

• In the top-right corner, the Get Actor of Class node references the BP_Spline.
• The returned value of this function is stored in a variable named Custom Spline.
• For the object to move along the spline, the function must be explicitly called during execution.

Timeline and Object Movement

The timeline function defines the duration of the movement. This determines how long the object takes to travel along the spline.

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Applications and Next Steps

1. Use PCG techniques to build terrain for large-scale world creation.
2. Study car movement dynamics, including acceleration, deceleration, and how speed changes based on pathway curves.
3. For an MVP, experiment with basic movements using a cube before transitioning to a car mesh with mechanics and rigging.
4. Implement camera tracking for dynamic shots, such as top-down or rotating angles, following the car’s motion.
5. Research cinematic references for camera movements, such as Kubrick-style angles and transitions to an upside-down world.

PCG implementation/ instructions

The images below are screenshots of my notes, representing the process of PCG implementation, consecutive stages, and exploratory work.

Changes to the project agenda

While studying narrative for animation and cinematography as a newcomer in the School of Screen, I realized that it would make perfect sense to reflect on theory and incorporate the techniques I’ve learned in practice. Visual storytelling in film involves the concept of cinema as a frame, which one can manipulate to alter the audience’s perception and, consequently, deform or deconstruct the familiar world depicted. I was particularly interested in camera movements and shots that provide viewers with unsettling, uneasy impressions. Hence, the following techniques became a priority: Dutch Angle/Tilted Angle, Dolly Zoom (Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and the Rolling Camera which shifts the perspective upside down.

There was one particular camera movement that I kept seeing across various scenes in recent productions: the 180-degree roll, which essentially flips the world upside down. When it comes to shots and views, there’s one called the eye-level view, which is an approximation of human perspective from the height of our own bodies. While we may be becoming more familiar with the bird’s-eye view due to booming drone technology, it’s still not inherently part of our nature. I decided that this could easily be classified as unfamiliar. For example, portraying the car driving through the forest from angles different from the eye-level view, using a camera movement that unsettles the audience with an altered perspective

Storyboard for project reflecting changes

Project objectives

Animation:

• Animate the vehicle using a control rig.
• Implement camera animation for establishing shots of the landscape, focusing on capturing the accelerating vehicle.

Research:

• Study car animation techniques and camera animation, particularly top-angle shots and rotations, with reference to examples from cinematography.

Assets:

• Landscape model.
• Rigged car model.

Aesthetics:

• The landscape will be designed to create a negative space that symbolizes the human brain, with the car’s journey representing a surreal exploration of the unconscious mind.
• Camera movements will be employed to symbolize the transition to an upside-down world, serving as a metaphor for the deconstruction of a familiar environment
  

Examples of Works Featuring Notable Camera Movements:

This section in short covers the camera movement and hidden meaning/ symbolism that I found within the production/ contemporary cinema, which accounts for some of the inspirations that informed me about shaping my visual storytelling.

A pivotal moment in Smile (2022) occurs when Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), the protagonist, is driving her car after experiencing a distressing sequence of events. She begins to realize that she is being influenced by the curse of the “smile.” This moment becomes particularly striking when the camera shifts to an upside-down perspective. Beyond being a visual trick, this inversion serves as a metaphorical device that reflects Rose’s emotional and psychological turmoil, as well as the confusing nature of her new reality.

Stranger Things uses a variety of visual and cinematic techniques to portray the characters’ psychological and emotional experiences, particularly their perceptions of reality. The show is known for its use of camera angles, reflections, and environmental distortions to represent themes of trauma, fear, and the collapse of reality. These visual cues mirror the protagonists’ emotional and mental states, much like the upside-down camera angles in Smile, which symbolize disorientation and the breakdown of reality.

Similar camera movement can be spotted at the Infinity Pool (2023) by Brandon Cronenber, introducing a range of camera movements, rotations, and zoom techniques to enhance the film’s bizarre and dizzying atmosphere.

In Enter the Void (2009), directed by Gaspar Noé, rotating camera angles, first-person perspectives, and distorted zooms are used to convey the sensation of out-of-body experiences.

180 camera roll: What do I want to convey?

The camera movement depicts the transition to the upside-down world, delivered with a rotation of around 180 degrees. The camera spline trail is used to define the path for the car movement, which is the same path used for the camera capturing the car from the above, ‘the bird eye view’ that rotates upside down. Bringing unsettling sensation to the audience-screen relation, similar to the Dutch angle, but more of a feeling of spinning.

Symbolism: Indirect messaging.

While researching camera movements and the Paramount production for the movie Smile, I discovered a hidden meaning. In the opening of the film, the Paramount animation logo is altered, flipping 180 degrees in a snap. This flip seems to symbolize or reference the theme of the film, as the stars form the shape of a smile. I was astonished that I figured this out on my own! Initially, I had been focused on the camera movement itself and hadn’t considered this deeper connection until it came to me.

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I really love this idea. I’m all about the Gestalt Principles, which focus on finding patterns and meaning in chaos. This concept inspired me to incorporate negative space into my shot. Initially, I wanted to create the outline of a brain in the middle of the field. However, during the early research phases, the idea of exploring the unconscious mind led to something that turned out a bit strange—almost like UFO traces or too vague for someone to understand unless they were really looking into it. In the end, I decided to deliver a question mark shape, which I outlined with a spline. This spline created the pathway and procedurally altered the generated content by removing overlapping points from the clouds along the trajectory of the question mark.


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Procedural World Population

Populating the world procedurally required learning a lot about node-based coding in Unreal Engine 5 and generating point clouds. I worked through numerous tutorials to wrap my head around these techniques. These include but are not limited to the following the following sources:

PCG basic Save Days! Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG) – Photoreal Landscape Tutorial
PCG and spline 7 Minute Photoreal Forest! Procedural Content Generation PCG in Unreal Engine
PCG theory Procedural Content Generation Overview | Unreal Engine 5.5 Documentation | Epic Developer Community

The images below are screenshots of my own notes, representing the process of the PCG implementation, consecutive stages, and exploratory work.

Procedural environment exploration result

The video below shows a screencast of manually exploring the world using keyboard navigation. The scene features an Australian landscape created using Pixel Pack assets and PCG techniques, including the spline technique. This approach allows for altering the landscape dynamically, such as adding a town in the middle of the terrain and a road running through the entire environment.

All of the assets used come from the Fab platform, which was encouraged by the module leader.