As Marc’s knowledge grows, he’s able to guide the kids as they explore their love of film. For a recent assignment, now known as Alien Spaceship, he asked them to create a short cinematic using the same Mixamo assets and characters Marc obtained during one of his Udemy courses. The focus, as you can guess, centered on the interior of an alien ship. But each student had to define what came next.All the lighting, camera work, and filming for each project was done in Unreal Engine, giving students a taste of how virtual productions operate in the real world. For the moment, each short is fully CG, but Marc hopes to incorporate Quixel environments, green screens, and live models in the future, so his students can see how compositing helps provide an intriguing balance of real and virtual.
“What’s amazing about this workflow is that it’s not even powered by high-end machines,” says Marc. “We are using anything we can get our hands on, which frequently consists of regular computers with updated GPU cards. To me, that’s the magic of Unreal. It’s versatile and supports programs like ours that are approaching real-time any way we can. That’s really powerful for a teacher. It’s one thing to see the future, it’s another to employ it right away.”
And Along Came Pikachu
As VR became more of a hot topic, Marc leapt at the chance to build it into his curriculum. After receiving initial funds from the Experiential Learning Division of the Ottawa Carleton School Board, the class created the first high-school-driven VR experience in their region—an amusing little game where players walk around with a hockey stick, softly whacking Pikachus.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog