Samus Scroll 3: Just Wow! (Patreon)

3/22/19: Just Wow!
I honestly can't believe how far this Patreon has gotten. This is just insane and I truly hope I can impress you all with each further video! Thank you!
Currently, I'm post-editing the final version of Samus's vid. Everything is rendered!

I currently have plans to use CityEngine, Camera 360 for EASY UE4 VR stereo rendering, (JUST came out) and then more simulated stuff.
I actually think I know enough to go back to Neko vid and fix all its problems!

One thing I'm considering that seems to stray me off the path are the speedruns. I clearly am still at a learning point where I want to slow down and try new things while having nice and lengthy videos. This causes each speedrun to be handled as if a full video.
So, I plan to finish most of what I've already planned before doing another one.

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3/15/19: SO CLOSE:
There's not much left! I've got hair physics done for all parts of the video! Now everything involves UE4!
Checklist:
✔️Hair Physics and reimport a new Samus.
✔️Fix animation in part 2 and 3.
✔️Add landscape to areas that can be seen on camera. Especially non-existant streets.
✔️Depth of Field for each shot. But this goes last due to self-deletion bug every time I load the project.
Edit: This ACTUALLY saved! Whoo!

✔️Destruction in part 2 almost complete with only extra scenes to work on. (Raise some rocks and particle effects)
✔️Destruction in part 3 at 1 part where she drags her foot across the entire strip. (Still no idea how to approach)
🔜Add Patreon names across the video.

I'm gonna wake up super early tomorrow to try and finish this! I might add the extra shots on full YouTube video release to give them extra time.

Edit:
The work I did this morning was MASSIVE. LOTS of destruction at the end got done!
I'm gonna do the Patreon names throughout next week as I work on the extra detail scenes for full release. What's coming out tonight for Early Access is the "core" video that was meant to happen without any extra stuff that popped up and still needs work.
I've rendered part 2 and 3 and will render part 1 tonight then put it all together!


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3/12/2019: HAIR PHYSICS
I finally got this shit working right now this morning and it's glorious!
I've been following this youtube video: https://youtu.be/c11l2o5uCQs
To get this youtube video's results: https://youtu.be/NpuhgbSbXEE

Ok, so right here, you see a bone chain, right? But it's not. That's actually a thin line mesh with a bunch of vertex points. Those boxes are parented to each point.
I did this by going through Samus's hair bone points and putting Blender's 3d "cursor" over the point for the box to spawn there. That technique also helped created areas for the vertex points of the thin line mesh to copy. Those boxes are what Samus's hair bones follow.
Then the thin line mesh gets cloth physics with weight painting/pinning from the top gradually loosening up towards the bottom.
Now the thin line mesh is parented to Samus's head bone to follow it correctly.

So each of Samus's hair bones are following the bottom box of itself with an IK follow constraint. Which means the top box doesn't have anything following it.
The trickiest part was connecting Samus's hair to be actually normal. The bones were a mess! Flipped upside down each and not even connected to each other! This technique finally properly worked this morning when I finished connecting them as you see.

Now the results of all this work and setup is being able to simulate/animate the hair til it's exactly how I want. I can record the keys of Samus's hair bones for areas that I like, in which this is SUPER stable without much performance impact, and if I don't like an area, I can simply delete the keyframes there to animate it myself or change the physics to what I want from then on. Because the keyframes of the bones were recorded previously, the previous parts don't matter. I do wonder if it will 'snap' into place the moment the keyframes are unlocked.
But that's a theory for later. The hair is perfectly working and i'm celebrating this finished work flow area!
Oh! The best part. There's zero bone jitter. You know how some mmd models will kinda jiggle when nothing is going on? This avoids that and is SUPER SMOOTH.
(Scene set to solid view for performance because there's so much going on)

In yet other better news, I've gotten closer to getting simulated destruction down in Blender rather than the faked kind I do in UE4. It's like taking a cube, cracking it, then applying physics to all the new cracks by using copy from active, then parenting it to an empty axis so that it can be exported to UE4 as a "skeleton" with rigid body animation. It does require the simulation to be completely keyframed. Which is what the bake to keyframes button is for. (Only available for rigid body physics in which every single crack has)

The real thing to consider at this point is just texturing. Because technically, I could use very simple shapes to replace walls or streets and just need to texture them to mimic them. I just don't want to individually texture a thousand pieces. I already know this mesh in UE4 will unhide right on top of the perfect one that will hide at the moment of impact. I did this with the sign the guy gets struck into and it was perfect!
I'll be using this technique for Neko vid. These two things are exactly what I need to learn to progress!

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3/7/19: Recovery
I've suckenly gotten sick the last few days and am starting to recover. That's nice!
What I've done so far has been the destruction in the extra traffic shot, adding more lightning in the end, and LOTS MORE DESTRUCTION DISCOVERY.

So here, because I placed each street part myself, I'm able to sink it down while Samus rests her head on it. I placed a bunch of rubble rocks parented to one or another where the parents moved in different ways to make this actually look pretty good in motion. But this is still moving meshes for destruction, I found some new shit that ROCKS.

I got some crack damage decals that are place-able however I want. I can set them to be hidden until the exact moment they need to crack. If I continue with these, I can somehow learn to make the crack come from the center and do other stuff like make the cracks look even deeper. (All texture stuff I have no idea about)
The other thing I found was a nice rock spitting emitter! I'm gonna use the shit out of it! It's front and center here and it just rocks... oh damn, I just ran into that pun twice.
Some problems I've been having in UE4 recently has been the sequencer deleting my depth of field progress. It's slight blurring in the background that makes so much of the scenes look better with focus. (The pic above would've had the far left part of it slightly blurred so the focus is stronger on her foot rather than everything being in detail)
But that progress is gone the moment I save.
I hate bugs like that. Will contact Epic about that.
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3/4/19: The Grind
Needed 2 parts because of how many pictures I took of the ending.
Part 1 is already complete! I just needed to add vehicles to the background moving.
It's part 2 that's gonna be insane work.

Thumbnail looking a bit more finalized. I'm thinking of adding a few cars to the background to fill that in. This shot was screencapped while the whole thing was running. Guess I got some motion blur to adjust still.

I'm gonna have to animate all that. Well, don't get anywhere complaining.
JUST. DO. IT.
Flying cars are completely animated though!

This shot got a small change to it. It's now attached to the car on the left and shows when Samus's growth lightning strikes that it starts to fall. Pretty cool!

Look at that triple strike! Happened by complete accident! But damn does it feel good. Each car had to be hand animated with it's own electric flash and the lights/thrusters shut off. This took some serious time.

There was so much going on that I hid quite a few cars underneath the level so that they wouldn't get in the way of the shot.

Now this is gonna be something to behold. This is yet another 2nd shot that happens at the same time as above.

Throughout will be some serious destruction with flying cars falling and ground cars flying all over... that will have to be hand-animated. Worth.

Last thing I worked on was turning the tree lights green and then the whole alley progressively fading out their lights. No, I will not do the building on the left. That sounds like torture. I think that's everything. This vid has been some hard work and I'll have to edit Samus's eyes/walking still, but a godlike vid is godlike forever.

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3/4/19: Ending
I apparently need another one of these since the 2nd one is jam-packed!
Let's start with the ending:




I can't wait to add a mega environment to this shot. I've been looking it up and it seems Brushify will make it massively easier by making literal mountains as a preset paint brush.



I should extend this part a bit since it cuts off at exactly this point. Came out surprisingly well.

So this will be insanely tricky. She'll be wiping out this strip with her foot and that's a LOT OF DAMAGE to try and figure out how to destroy.

Ah, yup. Classic ending shot.


And finally the last shot of goddess Samus. Planet hasn't been destroyed yet, so she has currently failed her mission.