First I used Maya to set playblasts of all the camera angles that I wanted. At first I though this would be a good idea so I could just match the cameras when I started setting things up in Unreal. It didn't work too well, as my initial camera shots were kind of boring; mostly turntables and slow even camera panning. But it was somewhere to start from from.
Once I started working in Unreal, I found out that the cameras are not nearly as forgiving as Maya's. It was really frustrating at first, but I soon learned the secret: if you dont set the keyframes for the cameras right the first time, it is *way* easier to delete the camera animation altogether and start over than it is to monkey with curves. Moving curves inevitably results in the camera "rolling," as in the image starts spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. It doesnt look good and is almost impossible to get working again. Disclaimer: this could just be operator error, but I had a heck of a time with it.
I really liked the process of saving out the frames from Unreal. Playing with Kismet is like playing with the material editor in Unreal. I feel like I have a giant box of Legos, and I can make anything I can dream up. And setting up the Kismet to toggle on cinematic mode (HUD-less mode), then using Matinee to pull the camera from first-person perspective and using the cameras I animated was a pretty clever trick the Game Art staff showed us. But, it made me feel bad for all the students in the Computer Animation degree who have 5 minutes or so per frame, while I watch mine render in slightly less than realtime at 20 frames per second.
With my images rendered out, I used Quicktime to hook them up into one movie file, and Final Cut Pro to cut everything together. In terms of my editing style, I wanted to go for a simpler edit, one with mostly dissolves and fade-to-blacks. I feel that the work should stand on its own, and fancy camera paths, crazy editing, etc while it looks cool can hide the work. Maybe I'm wrong and the whole "looking cool" thing is what I should have done. I don't know yet. We'll see in a couple months if I'm still sitting at this computer looking for work, haha.
One of my shots required a bit of work to get looking the way I wanted it. The shot with the crawler on the moving floor required some hardcore rotoscoping with Nuke. I had to go frame by frame and cut out the floor that penetrated the far side of the pedestal. It was tedious but totally worth it.
With all my shots cut together, I noticed that the whole thing needed a gamma boost and a bit more saturation. Back to Nuke it went for an edit and re-render. But I noticed Nuke stripped the sound out of it. I probably could have figured out how to get Nuke to give me the sound file too, but I already had Final Cut open with all my sound set up, so I just set my new edited video track on top of everything and re-exported it. As a wise man in the cg industry told me, "If it's cheating, but it works, it isn't cheating." (Note: unless that cheating involves plagiarism, which should be punishable by flogging.)
And there you have it. My demo reel from start to finish for the last three weeks.
Ben
