I tried to reproduce a Dolly zoom (also known as the Hitchcock Zoom, after Alfred Hitchcock first used it in his 1958 movie, Vertigo.)
I decided to use the scene in the 1975 movie, Jaws – If you haven’t seen the scene before, there’s a clip of it below:
This is the scene I tried to recreate
Process
I decided to both the foreground and the background, and use them as two separate plates
The idea was to move the camera towards (and further from) the foreground, and adjust the zoom, keeping the character the same size.
Because these are two image planes, though – and not a 3D environment, zooming out just made the images smaller and didn’t quite have the desired effect.
For this, I had to fake the effect by scaling up (or down) the background.
I tried out the free lighting setup by using a model of a car from Assetto Corsa, and rendering a video of a Mixamo character against a green background.
I have to say I’m so impressed with the results of this lighting setup!
Download it from Gumroad at https://flwdbydsgn.gumroad.com
Hello – and welcome, or welcome back to the channel. I’m going to be using some Sheffield buildings I found on 3D Warehouse, and importing them into my Unreal map. With them using imagery from Google Earth, I can’t actually use them in the game – but for a sense of where things should go, and how they should look – they’re a lot more useful than the grey blockout buildings you see on the screen. The building we’ve just ran past is Montgomery Theatre on Surrey Street.
I’ve got 3D Warehouse open, and I’m going to use Sheffield Library for this example. So, I download the Sketchup file. I’m going to use the 2023 version, because I’ve downloaded the latest Sketchup – and activated a 30 day free trial of Sketchup Pro – the reason for this is that the Free version of Sketchup doesn’t allow you to export files like we’ll need to do.
I should also apologise for the ReStream overlay, I wasn’t expecting this to come up while I was recording offline screen activity – and don’t feel like re-recording the footage.
Once I’ve opened it, I’ll go to File → Export, and save it as Collada DAE Remember to select Options and ensure that ‘Export texture maps’ is enabled.
I’ll jump over to Blender, where I have a map of Sheffield from the blender-osm plugin, and find the Library. In this map, I’ve coloured all the Sketchup imports yellow, so that I can identify them later – and I’ll search for Library. Once I’ve found it on the Outliner, I’ll press Numpad full stop, or period – to jump to the building on the map
I’ll go into edit mode, select the roof – and Shift S → Cursor to selected, and back to Object mode.
Now when I’ve imported the .dae file, I’ll press Shift → S again and this time ‘Selection to Cursor’
This will snap the imported Sketchup file to the approximate region of the actual building on the map
I’ll eyeball it so it lines up with the map, and select Origin → To Geometry
You’ll be able to tell when it has worked, because all the elements will have those orange dots on them.
Once that’s complete, click File → Export – and this time you want to export to an FBX file.
Now I’m going to head over to Unreal, and import the building.
Open the Content Drawer
I’ve got a subfolder for each building, because they are made of a lot of different parts of mesh.
And I’ll drag the FBX file into the newly created folder, and select Import All.
I’ve got a search filter enabled to only show Static Mesh, and I’ll Select All, and drag them anywhere onto the scene.
To put them into place, I’ll reset the Location and Rotation with the backwards-facing arrow button – and then ‘F’ to jump to the building on the map.
This building actually has quite a bit going on; the yellow mesh is the previous Library I had there -but untextured, so I’ll be replacing that. The dark grey building is The Graves Gallery, which occupies the same building as the library.
I’ll open the content drawer, and I want to adjust the collision for all these mesh elements -so I’ll open a row at a time, to keep track of which I’ve done.
From the panel on the right, I’ll search for Collision to filter out the settings, and change the Collision Complexity to ‘Use Complex Collision as Simple’
Now I need to do that for all of the tabs open.
File → Save All
Now I can delete the yellow mesh-only library, and you can see the textured version in place.
I’ll click Play from Here, and see how it looks in-game.
It’s above ground level, and that’s to be expected – I need to model in the walkway, and the library actually has stairs up to it to access the entrance.
And then if we come up to the roof, you can see how the two buildings are merged.
Let’s have a little run across the rooftops, to make sure the collision is working
And while we are here, we can enjoy the view.
From up here, we can see one of the University buildings straight ahead, and if I run over here – we can see a building I’d prepared earlier – the Millenium Gallery.
I’ve done it again with the City Hall. This time I’m going to let it play out in realtime, so you can see what I’m doing.
If we have a quick run around it, we can see that it’s raised off the ground – but in actual fact it does have steps raised up towards it, so it won’t be flat on the ground – again, I’ll have to put the walkway in for it.
This is why it’s so important to set up the collision on the mesh elements – you’ll see on some parts, the player seems to be walking on the air.
In this very brief video, I’m going to give you a very brief introduction to Render AI for Blender. I’ll show you how to create a basic render using Render AI and then discuss some of the features and benefits of using Render AI.
If you’re new to Render AI or Blender, this video is a great way to get started. By the end of this video, you’ll have a basic understanding of how to use Render AI in Blender and be able to create basic renders quickly and easily!
A quick video where I take a portrait of myself that my girlfriend drew and painted, and animate it with EbSynth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4eVyYhi0kM
Hello, this is the first video for a while, and I wanted to share a portrait of me that my girlfriend had painted, which I really like – it’s very Van Gogh. I also wanted to show you how to quickly animate some video footage in the same style using a package called ebsynth.
The first thing you’ll need is some video footage. I’ve tried to replicate the angle and basic shapes of the picture for the best effect when I come to animate it. I import the footage into Blender, crop out any jumpy movement at the beginning and move my head around a little.
Once I have a short little clip, I’ll render them out as PNG. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to render it at the same resolution as the original image, 1600×1474. That might sound like a weird resolution, and it is – but I’ll scale it accordingly to fit in the video you’re watching now.
Once I have my frames all rendered in PNG, I’ll import them all into eBsynth in the Video section, and the single image into the Keyframes section. Choose a directory, and Synth. It might take a while, so I’ll pause the video here.
It has been way too long since I’ve worked on this, and a trip into the city centre had inspired me to pick up where I’d left off with the project: which insofar has been work on a few buildings, no actual gameplay implementation…yet.
Naturally, I will have to carefully consider the plot-line – masked protesters amidst a war within the city doesn’t feel dystopian anymore, it’s practically a reality.
This is a short video demonstrating the process used to import the base character from the Armory first-person template project into the 3D representation of the map. Really, it’s a compilation of the past week or so’s screen recordings that I hadn’t done anything with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jebEvfq-DI
And this is it working!
In between these two videos, I’d also done a calibration live-stream, in preparation for future development streams, in which I had one mystery viewer observing the whole show, and I have no idea who it was!
I haven’t embedded it here because it isn’t so integral to the story that it needs embedding, and if I were to episodify them all, this it would be a pilot episode, or a dress rehersal: feel free to have a watch, though.
Colour analysis of some terrible low resolution video footage of lastnights Uber-Storm over Sheffield. Media had predicted a 2 month downfall of rain within a few hours. it was a very intense thunderstorm.
I’ve done some colour analysis so you can see a breakdown of the chaos within the clouds. Music: Actual thunderstorm ( and some weird unexplainable blips)
There’s a few seconds of some footage of an Assetto Corsa replay where I’d tried to replicate my friend Jme’s Volkswagen Polo – and _then_ the lightning.
I’d tried to grab some georeferenced data of The Barge in Grimsby, but it kept crashing. I sped it up and made it fit a dance track.
If you want to do that yourself, add your video footage and then your audio: divide the length (in frames) of your video file by the length (in frames) of your audio file, add a Speed Transform to your video, and set the multiply speed to what your calculator results in.
More on the Whatsapp e-collaboration project with Sayanti, in this video – she explains the premise behind the project in both English and Bengali, we try our hand at stitching a story together, and I finish with a walkthrough around the 3D set I’ve been working on.
Development screenshots
Why are there no Bengali subtitles?
Sorry – I did try!
Planning
Sometimes I need to take screen breaks, so I sit with a pen and paper and plot my next moves when I get to my desk. With the same ethos of a swordsman who does not unsheathe his sword unless he is prepared to use it, I must take the same approach with screen recording software: so I don’t record unless I’m showing something. I digress… this was an idea I had.
