Eternal Trailer - 2020
Character animation and shot creation
For this project, I was asked to animate characters and render animation for the Eternal social media platform by what was once Eternal Ratio. The app was designed to be a virtual artsy hangout space on iOS, with each space being run by a little Unity client. The client wanted a trailer and intro video for the app to introduce it to new users. The client provided me with 3D assets from the proto-metaverse, the storyboard for the trailer they wanted me to create, and the soundtrack to time everything to.
When it came to rendering, the client wanted to show their metaverse’s colorful environment in a more polished space than they currently had in Unity. I wanted to use a renderer that could utilize my graphics card, and I didn’t want to spend too much on a render license. At the time, I only had access to Maya LT and I couldn’t use the Arnold renderer, so I steered towards the renderers in Blender, a package I was fairly familiar with. After some look development testing, the client liked the look of the path traced Cycles render more than the rastered Eevee render.
I was given around 9 characters to animate in various shots, with some shots involving ensembles. To ease my workload, I used motion capture retargeting using Maya LT’s HumanIK system alongside Mixamo motion capture data to give me a good baseline for run and walk cycles. Some of the characters the client delivered had rigging errors that could be seen from camera, so I fixed the client assets before adding animation. Using the client’s storyboard, I was able to time shots and cuts with minimal revisions from the client. With animation complete in Maya, I baked and exported animation to fbx to place the characters in Blender for rendering.
Overall, the project took about a month to complete and included character animation, rendering, VFX particle work, and compositing. It utilized my experience with moving files between different DCC software packages, and further honed my skills at handling that pipeline. I delivered the animation to the client in vertical video format as requested. The client later asked for a version in landscape, and with some minor edits, I delivered that version as well.