Week Three: September 10th-16th
In week four, I continued polishing and bugfixing. I was hoping to have until Thursday since the festival was Friday, but I had to have my final on Monday. I set up my DaVinci file for color grading, and stumbled my way through with troubleshooting help from our post-production instructor Liz Hollerman, who was a lifesaver. Once that was in, my objective was to try and get a 4k version rendered. This wasn't an option on my virtual machine due to its performance limits, but my generous classmate Carol Madrigal offered to render mine on her new machine, which was an enormous relief. Once that was in, I plugged it into my DaVinci scene and rendered the final.
In week four, I continued polishing and bugfixing. I was hoping to have until Thursday since the festival was Friday, but I had to have my final on Monday. I set up my DaVinci file for color grading, and stumbled my way through with troubleshooting help from our post-production instructor Liz Hollerman, who was a lifesaver. Once that was in, my objective was to try and get a 4k version rendered. This wasn't an option on my virtual machine due to its performance limits, but my generous classmate Carol Madrigal offered to render mine on her new machine, which was an enormous relief. Once that was in, I plugged it into my DaVinci scene and rendered the final.
Film Festival
On Friday it was time to finally enjoy the film festival and breathe a collective sigh of relief and celebrate our work. It was great to enjoy the surprise of how the other team's shots came together and our team was really proud of how our "Don't Stop the Motion" sequence ended up.
Reception
Thankfully, there were lots of great comments from the other teams, who were really impressed at how ours flowed together. It was great to know I delivered on the promise of my original concept that was revealed two weeks prior.
Takeaways
In the end, I have a few chief takeaways from my time in the Animation Fellowship:
- Get obsessed with your project. It will help make sure you're seeing as many details and opportunities as possible.
- Get familiar with the proper terminology. This makes searching easier with the right keywords and saves you time with research.
- Log all the questions you have, and ask who seems like the best source. Be okay with "looking stupid" asking "easy" questions. Wheels don't have egos, so squeak away! And the fastest way to stop looking stupid is to teach others.
- Do a nighttime backup of your project. This was time-consuming but I never ran into issues.
- When we started I recommended to the animators who had never animated in Unreal before that they should animate 100% in the engine. They took this advice and came out with great pieces, and enjoyed the experience of animating in-engine.
- I still feel Unreal is the best animation experience you can have as a 3D animator, even though there are limits and bugs that set it back from Maya depending on the feature you're used to, but this is changing with each release.
- Motion trails are a lot more stable in Unreal, and I enjoyed long moments of polishing my motion with them.
- Unreal is a lot more stable in general than Maya, even though it shows lights and textures while you work.
- Once you finish an animation, lock it!
- My biggest recommendation: when you come with an idea, make sure you test it as much as possible for appeal and ingenuity. Get feedback on complexity, problem areas, and solutions. Remember that people want to help!
Virtual Production and Animation Fellowship group picture at the 2024 Unreal Fest in Seattle, Washington. I'm in the back row.
