Path of Exile: Affliction Talent Competition

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL24C00755BD7C0931

I got inspiration from the series Archive 81, The backrooms, Liminal space, Astartes Warhammer Animation and 10 months ago I thought I would learn Unreal Engine and start a short PoE series. I already had a good understanding of 3D principles so picking up UE wasn't too difficult, it was just slow at the beginning. The 1st episode took 4 months to make, 2nd took around 3 months and the 3rd one for the Talent Competition took 1 month. I made the swing party animation during the editing process when I got overwhelmed with the project.

I also used Cinema 4D for modeling the assets, however I used some store bought assets and megascans for high quality results. Finally Davinci Resolve for editing, coloring and sound design.

At first I had to think of a concept that I am able to produce alone. There are so many unique monsters and creatures in PoE and since I am not good at sculpting, designing monsters similar in poe was out of the question. So I thought my story will be played in an imaginary timeline, after the events of PoE where only a few monsters left in Wraeclast.

The idea was to show and explore Wraeclast in a first person perspective. This also eliminated the fact that I need to make a main character. To make a somewhat believable camera movement I recorded footage with my phone, tracked the video in Cinema 4D and moved the camera track data to UE. Later on I realized I can't avoid animating hands so I used Unreal Engine’s metahuman to show hands, legs and for a brief moment the whole character when he drops the camera.

Some of the animations and simulations were made in Cinema 4D like the gem rolling on the floor or the cloth in Lioneye's Watch. Rigging and animating the tentacles was in C4D as well. Also some UV editing too, although UE is quite powerful adjusting UVs.

Talent competition:

I was happy to see the talent competition and I was even more happy that I caught the announcement on day2 so I had a whole month to make something cool. Making the forest was quite easy with the megascan assets. However setting up proper lighting and atmosphere effects was quite a challenge. Next I wanted to introduce bugs in the scene. I wanted to make a repel effect but I just couldn't get it right. Maybe I will come back to that because I was quite close to the result. I ended up dropping that idea. After all, I had to finish the whole production before the deadline and there was still much ahead of me. Next I added the wisps. That time the wisps didn't have the attract force applied. I wanted to make a jumpscare so I added a zombie. For most of the character animation motion capture data was used. In the final part of the video I added 3 skeletons. Maybe it's unclear but they are meant to be the 3 npcs in the Wildwood. They are just skeletons because 100s of years have passed. I added weapons around the ritual site to give a hint they are the npcs. The player gives them the wisps so they revive for a final moment to open a portal. I had to dive into Unreal's particle simulation engine to make the spell/portal casting. After finishing that part I learned so much that I could make the attract effect for the wisps. I ended up re-working those scenes and rendering them again. I wanted to make something visually good looking for the ending scene and I thought the Temple of Atzoatl will be perfect. I wanted to make it look like the loading screen ingame. Water simulation was done in UE too.
After finishing the visuals for the episode I still had time to make an intro. I wanted to emphasize that we are after the events of PoE so I made a year counter and made an npc turn into a zombie over time.
Because it's a first person view animation, I didn't feel the need to add music throughout the video, however I wanted music for the intro. I purchased a license for 3 particular sound effects for the 3 videos and made a mashup for the intro. I used a Zoom H1n sound recorder for the sound foley and I added extra sfx from epidemic sound library and from freesound.

I finished the project with making youtube thumbnails