SCENE 26
This scene is the "Hive Bee" scene where the audience is introduced to a surveillance drone. It's right in the middle of our team being chased by a horde of Zombies. We wanted it to feel like a "we're pinched!" moment.
YUKI & THE HIVE BEE
Yuki is feeling a lot of things in this scene. Moments before, she had taken out a zombie that landed on some trash cans. This noise alerts the horde the team was trying to avoid. So there is definitely some guilt. Now add the threat of being captured by Hive Bees?
The Terror!
This is the first scene in the pilot where we introduce the Hive Bees. They're The Sanctuary District's surveillance and recovery droids. They patrol an area of Nuvitta called Salt Town. And it's implied that they "clean out" areas of the city by removing survivors.
The initial idea was that these Bees were new or retired tech that our team of five hadn't encountered before the X80 outbreak. All they know is that these Mech Bees are picking up people and taking them to the walled-off area they call "The Hive."
A place where no one is ever seen again. Dun-dun-duh!
We'll learn in later episodes that those outside of the Sanctuary District have created myth and legend around what's behind the 100-foot wall and the droids that kidnap survivors.
When we were naming the Hive Bees, it was important that it feel like something a pre-teen would call them. In our heads, "Bees!" is definitely a term the five survivors use amongst themselves whenever they are on prevision runs.
ROKOKO CHALLENGE
This is only a partial moment in the scene as we were submitting to the Rokoko Intergalactic Challenge. A 7-sec video moment meant to get people to stop channel surfing through an intergalactic TV-feed.
We were so excited when we placed in the Top 100 of submissions. It was really cool seeing how the judges reacted to the scene, especially because it was our first test run with Rokoko and the UE5 workflow.
ANIMATING FOR THE CHALLENGE
When we decided to enter the Rokoko Intergalactic Challenge, we knew we wanted to do something with Zomborgs. But what scene to choose from?
Why... let’s pick one of the hardest scenes we could possibly choose for our first mocap-to-UE5 scene. That's a good idea, right?
In the end... yes. It was a brilliant idea.
Jayson had just finished his enrollment with Josh Toonen at UnrealForVFX.com. And the knowledge he brought to the project was so very helpful. The community in the course was so helpful when it came to feedback on this one too.
By forcing ourselves into one of the hardest scenes, it pushed us to learn things fast.
MOCAP
This was our first go using Metahuman Animator and the Rokoko Suit, so we were very excited to explore bringing Yuki to life. Amber mo-capped Yuki's performance, and we were pleasantly surprised how simple the data capture was. Even the setup was pretty straightforward once we got it going.
Now, yes, there were some connectivity issues - but that's nothing new to us. Tech fails. Then it works. Gotta flow with it, ya know? The only gripe we had though was our glove had a malfunction where the middle finger just wiggled out of control. It required having to send the glove back to rokoko for repair. Not awesome. But we expect a return soon.
Despite the glove malfunction we were able to capture mocap for about 20 characters in the same day - which was... amazing. The cleanup was pretty minimal on this once we learned the power of control rigs and the use of cameras to hide the ugly stuff.
CAMERA & EDITING
Speaking of cameras - the experience of being able to go in and fine-tune shots and angles long after the action is shot was... so very exciting.
We come from a background of traditional pre-pro, production, post. The animation workflow is similar, but man does it change the production process.
Coming from the post pipeline there have been sooo many projects we've edited where we said, "Man, I wish this shot was just a little to the left!" Or "Where's your 180 rule, people?" Being able to go in and adjust the shot was something we were both so excited about.
It's pretty awesome that production IS the editing process with this workflow. It feels like a superpower.
CHARACTER DESIGN
We used Metahumans for all of our Zomborgs characters and have really enjoyed the process of using Blender and UE5's Mesh to Metahuman workflow. It helped us and our limited character design skills get closer to what we had previs’d using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
In this scene, we really only had one character that had hair that wasn't "Metahuman Hair." Because let’s be honest, hair is one of the first giveaways when watching stuff. That and their teeth... but that's a challenge yet to be tackled.
Thankfully, Prompt Muse came to the rescue with her Hair Tutorial the same day Amber went to buckle in and learn it. Who doesn't love a serendipitous moment on a journey?
It was our first attempt at custom hair, definitely not the best, but man, for this video it felt like magic.
IT'S AI-FREE
So for this one, we actually went the route of no AI. We used the UEforVFX post-processing workflow to get a pretty fun look.
MOVING FORWARD
Moving forward, we're going to be putting in the reps. We really want to get more practice in the engine, so we'll probably pick out a few scenes to tackle from the *Survivors'* screenplay.
At some point we'll tackle hair and wardrobe issues again. But right now we just want to get better at the scene building.
Let us know in the comments what scenes you want to see previs for!
