SPLINE TOOL

As the Technical Artist for the Seeking Sanctuary project, I used Unreal Engine 5’s blueprinting capabilities to develop a tool that randomly populates assets along a spline, streamlining the production process for Unreal Engine. To enhance the user experience, the tool includes customisable features such as density, rotation, and scale, making it easy for team members to customise the output for their respective scenes. The easy-to-swap assets make it adaptable, and the customisation features allow the team to make quick adjustments to the asset placements within a scene.

 

To ensure the tool's versatility, I tested and iterated on it using free assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace and the Unreal Engine starter content. As our team's models were created, I inserted them into the tool to test how it worked with our assets and to determine areas where the tool could be further developed. With this approach, I ensured that the tool's impact on engine performance remained minimal, even as the file size increased over time with added assets, animation sequences, and Metahumans.

 

In animation, set dressing plays a crucial role in effectively telling a story. Environments around a character help set the tone for the shot, scene, and animation as a whole, providing the audience with small details that might not be conveyed otherwise. With the asset placement tool I created, we were able to streamline the production of environments, providing our team with more time to create the more complex components of the animation, while still ensuring that the small storytelling details were not overlooked.

 

Overall, this tool was a valuable addition to the Seeking Sanctuary project, helping us save time and resources while producing high-quality animations.