Be Quite - SCP

I am a big fan of the SCP stories and games, so I wanted to create a little shot inspired by them. With anything, you want to build a little story into it. I liked the idea of someone running away from an SCP, it adds a sense of fear and excitement. The Thumbnail image is something I made a while ago, so for this instructable, I wanted to bring the image to life.

These are just the software I use, but similar results can be done with many others. However, you will need a PC to run them all.

Motion Builder

Blender

Unreal Engine

Camera to record Motion capture Data

Gather your assets.

The office assets are from Kit Bash 3D, With my subscription, I have access to a certain number of assets a month. So i downloaded their police office scene. For the characters, I got them on Sketchfab, and they are under a Creative Commons license.

Build your scene

Once you have all your assets, you want to start placing them around and building the overall scene of what your camera is gonna see. If you didn't already have the assets, you could still do this using primitive shapes and make a block out. At this point, it is also good to start thinking about where you want your camera to go so you can work around it, and only add what you need. If something is not gonna be visible, you dont need it.

Rig your characters.

While two of my characters already came with a rig, the D-Class did not. This means I would have to rig it myself. Luckily, I can just use the Rig from the Scientist model, and use Blender's automatic weights tool to weight paint them. It's important to try and have different character models use the same rig, which I'll explain later.

Create your animations

Ideally, you would want to block the whole scene out, or act out the motions and edit them together in a video file. It's always good to do a very rough version of your animations before going straight into the final. I didn't do that because of time constraints. For my animation, I wanted to use motion capture, since I was trying to go for realism, and most of my characters were humanoid. Mo-Cap would work great. To do this, unless you have a motion capture suit, you will need to use software to convert a video of yourself to Mo-Cap data. There are many software programs that can do this, the one I used is called QuickMajic. It's easy to use and pretty cheap. So I put the videos of me acting out the motions into the software, and it gave me a Mixamo rig.

Clean up

While the QuickMajiic software is pretty good, it can still create a lot of errors. There are many software programs you can use to clean this data up, my favourite is Motion Builder. It handles Mo-Cap data very well and is quite intuitive once you get the hang of it. I first start by characterizing the Mixamo rig, then, since I know my character models also have the same rig and bone placement. I can save and reuse the characterization. This is why we want are models to use the same rigs, it lets us only have to characterize the rig once in Motion Builder.

Now that the animations can work on my character rigs, I can start the cleanup. I will mainly use the graph editor for this, but Motion Builder has a lot of great filters that make it super easy to get rid of jitter and misaligned motion. I can also use the additive layers to fully reposition parts of the animation, which really helps to line up things like the hands so they are making contact with the desk and desk dividers.

Import to Unreal Engine 5.

Now that all the animations are done, I can import the models into Unreal Engine, which is what I will use to render my animation. This is also a pretty easy process, First, you import the character from Blender. Then, in Motion Builder, bake the animation to the skeleton and save just the skeleton as an FBX. Import that FBX into Unreal and select the character's rig you want it to connect to. Then, in the level sequence, drag and drop the animation file.

Lighting

Now we have our animations and assets all set up in Unreal, we have to light our scene, which is also the theme of the contest. For the lighting, I wanted it to represent each of the characters. So I used an orange lamp to illuminate the scientist, who can be seen as the “innocent” helpless victim, fearing for his life. The D-Class is being illuminated by a blue light, giving him a mysterious and unnerving feel. As the viewer, you don't know why he's a prisoner and what he will do to the scientist if they make it out alive. The monster (SCP-939) has a glowing red light behind it, which contrasts well since it is also a red creature and there is a mostly black background. The red shows it is a scary and evil creature, on the hunt for any people it can find. Each character has a corresponding light connected with them and adds to the overall theme of he shot.

Final Shot, it's short, but I think it captures everything I wanted you to feel when watching, and the moody lighting really brings it all together.