Concept
Marionette is an interactive unreal engine project that allows people to interact with the virtual cyborg puppets with their hands in a touch-free way. The scene and virtual interactive part were created in Unreal Engine, and a Leap Motion controller was used to recognize hand postures and movements. I wanna explore whether people can maintain their original purity without being manipulated by rapid technology development in the meta world. Are we "human" in the meta world? Or we are "metahuman" in the real world? Are we manipulating the puppets? Or they are manipulating us?
Project Management
Inspiration
After getting the theme of the Cornell box, my original idea was to make an unreal interactive project about puppets, using every finger to control every part of the Puppet. My initial idea was to have a simple background, to give a theater-like spotlight, and some ropes, to make a simple scene. Later, I plan to turn the theater set in the original scene into a cyborg and a more cyberpunk-style futuristic scene.
Physical assets
I first put the cyborg characters into Mixamo, and wanted to get an animation and physical assets, but after exporting the files to unreal, I found that there were no physical assets, so I manually added the physical assets one by one. In order to allow every body part of cyborg to move.
Leap Motion Connected to Unreal
I first tried some connection tests on leap motion. Because the tutorials I found on youtube are all about how to connect between leap motion and Unity, there are very few unreal tutorials, so I have been struggling for a long time. Later, I downloaded the plug-in of unreal on GitHub and downloaded some software online to check the connection.
Unreal
I first established some scenes and assets in C4D and then export them from C4D to Unreal.
I created a glow material to achieve the effect of futurism. Since the color of my puppet is pink, so I decided to create a blue glow material to give the sense of futurism and contrasting color. Then, I put this glowing blue as my wall color.
Then I put leaf motion hand and first-person point of view character in front of the cyborg puppet.
Then I started to write the animation blueprint and level blueprint. I basically want to use a hand grab to control the body movements. Therefore, I first write the animation blueprint to control the body transformation, and then I connect the animation blueprint to the level blueprint.
In the end, I use the sequencer to create a film inside Unreal. I use manual focus and use 16mm lens to record environmental scenes and use 35mm/50mm to record some focus scene.
