"TWO POINT ZERO" | SCI-FI ANIMATED SHORT: Unreal Engine, Metahuman, and iClone

An unfinished android wanders a post-apocalyptic landscape searching for purpose. Happiness is where you find it.

I've been wanting to revisit science fiction after Reap What You Sow and was especially excited to play with a different style. TWO POINT ZERO contains almost no dialogue. It's a uplifting story about atmosphere and the melancholy stillness of a dystopian world. 

And I wanted to give the horror genre a short break. :)

I also wanted to use a genuine robot character, which is challenging to send through the Character Creator/iClone pipeline because some Daz 3D characters don't play well with the always helpful Transformer converter. This character was sent to the engine using the Daz to Unreal plugin and then the skeleton was mapped to accept retargeted iClone/Unreal animations. 

What's very cool about this is that there's a ton of weird Daz Genesis characters that can't be converted to Character Creator but can still be animated in Unreal. I figured as much but this was successful a test of it.

The girl character is a Daz/iClone body with a Metahuman head. It's still a bit of a process to create these hybrids but until it's easy to clothe Metahumans in different wardrobe, this will have to do. It ain't perfect but works for now. 

I animated her face using ARKit and the Live Link app. I recorded it right in the animation blueprint which is simple and fast; and gives you clean FBX files to work with (unlike Take Recorder). 

I performed all the mocap as usual using the Perception Neuron 3 system. Environments came from the Unreal Marketplace.  

Beli, you'll always be my little one. 

Thank you for watching!

#scifi #sciencefiction #robot #postapocalyptic #hope