Unreal Engine is magical to me. This past year, I've been learning about what it is capable of doing and for the first time in forever, I feel like I could make a movie once again. I've worked on and made live-action movies in the past, but I also dreamt of creating animated work. The tools were never aligned to a DIY approach. Daz was the closest to what I wanted to do, but the render time is what prevented me from pursuing it further.
Unreal Engine eliminates the render time. You can make an animated film in real-time. It is pure magic to me and I am only beginning to wrap my head around it. What I have been able to ascertain is that the textures are front-loaded with the CPU and the GPU handles everything else. Whereas traditionally, the textures are loaded at render time and it takes minutes per frame (or even a full day or two per frame in the early days of computer animation).
Major studios are seeing their production time improving and Unreal has so many possibilities for real-time production, that the world feels endless. I am now returning to an anything is possible mindset of Indie Production and want to pursue learning Unreal Engine with everything I've got. I had given up on ever being able to do this. I am extremely thankful that the tools are now catching up to what I and so many others envisioned being able to do years ago.
For "In the Beginning...", I set up a goal of learning how to build a scene and animate a camera in Unreal Engine. The target is 30 seconds of animation for each and utilizing assets from KitBash3D.
"In the Beginning..." is my first attempt(s) at creating in Unreal Engine. I hope by the time I am finished with each of the projects I want to do in 2024, I will be able to construct a full narrative piece and see what happens.
Here is "In the Beginning... The First Sequence":
I thought if I share this content, others might like to see how it started for someone else, and that anyone can learn and create. Even this old guy right here (me). :)