Creating the rig
While Zach and I both wanted to reflect different faucets of the game, we knew we needed a malleable Mannequin rig to work with. Thankfully, we're fairly experienced with animation blueprints and math stuff since SOL CONSTRUCT contains only two hard-coded animations, with everything else being procedural (Recoil, Sway, Movement, etc). So this was a simple case of creating a child of our player so it can inherit our inventory system that manages all items (Including attachable modules) and giving the Frame a new Anim Instance Class to work with that only reads from a simple map of Bone Names and rotations.
A messy but functional instancing of all the Frame’s bones, rotations and equipped modules
All of this is being sent in the construction script, allowing full manipulation of not just the bones rotations, but also which modules are equipped on the frame, allowing us to have full creative control with what kind of characters we want to show on our posters. This Rig was also super important for the sake of a 2 second clip for our trailer, but I'll get to that later. A nice touch is that all of our modules have independent skeletal meshes too (Yes your CPU will hate us) and these can be driven on top of the Player's procedural animation!
A wee preview of what this Module swapping can do to make clips!"
Now that the Rig's out of the way, it's camera time! I rarely get to mess around with Cine Camera stuff and "Proper Renders" so It was interesting having a look around, trying to get a sharp focus (and failing) and setting up the aspect ratio. We settled on 30mm Focal Length too so we could get some close shots with enough of the background in tool. After that it was some standard level sequence setting up and making sure the sequence config file got it's settings propagated. Like most people, I was incessantly bothered by the Unreal's Tile Count and it's funkiness. Thankfully after much trial and error I managed to land on a tile count (4) that didn't make my GPU crash and didn't leave those hazy grid lines. This also took some playing around with the Tile Overlap.
Now I definitely wasn't expecting this to be such a minefield of trial and error, especially with what I thought was a pretty good Rig, but sadly Unreal's renders didn't come close to pushing my rig like EXR's did... but we'll get to that.
