Here’s a video I did for the tax company, Avalara. I was responsible for creating the storyboards, visual style, models, animation, lighting, and camera movements. The walk cycle of the character was edited and toned down by another animator as requested by the client (Apparently I made my older walk cycle too happy ) The Avalara introductory logo, and logo design were not done by me.
The models and animations were created mostly as separate objects in 3D Studio Max, and the actual rendering and compositioning of the scenes done in Unreal Engine 4. UE4’s Matinee was used to power the playing of the animations and camera movements, and the video was finally edited together in After Effects.
Scenes were a mixture of being built to the world space, and built as separate instances.
All in all, it was fun piecing things together in Unreal. I definitely don’t think I would of been able to do something similar in scope using a more traditional renderer on my laptop and with the short amount of time given, gotta love how UE4 renders with depth-of-field, motion blur, dynamic shadows, and all that Jazz practically for free. Go go Epic!
Awesome! Love to see real-time rendering used more and more for different things. This was executed much better than I would have predicted. It looks great. Congratulations!
One thing that was new to it was using Particle flow in Max to animate the papers spawning and following splines, each path basically being a separate animation sequence chunk that was brought into Unreal Engine 4 using a script that baked out the particles to meshes with keyframes, which were played via matinee. I also ended up spending my free $30 for the UE4 marketplace and bought a nice set of dissolve materials to help me get started with creating the effect for when the objects are supposed to turn orange.
Well for the first two videos it was basically just me, minus the script, voice over, and a couple of walk cycle/sitting at the desk animations. (One other guy was here for a short time and did the revised walk cycle, person sitting at desk moving mouse, guy carrying the boxes, and pushing the cart animation cycles on a couple of days when I was super busy.)
I handled the creation of the style, storyboard, models, animations, materials, lighting, cameras, final rendering, and editing together (Alot of switching back and forth between Unreal Engine 4 and 3D Studio Max, with the final compilation done in AfterEffects, the glowing material effect used in the second video was based off of a dissolve effect package I bought off of the market to save some time, and the water effect in the intro of the first video was a hacked material of one of the ocean templates Epic Games has under their examples, basically to get the vertex animation in the Z-axis of the faceted plane). I received narrative input during the creation of the projects from both my boss/creative director who handles the writing of the script and oversaw/was part of the brainstorming sessions, and the client themselves who asked for a few changes during the process.
I currently am working on the third video which has a couple of assets from another artist we temporary hired while I was working on the second, and we hired a new guy to work on the fourth while I continue the third and answer any questions from him in regards to getting his animations from 3D Studio Max into UE4 and properly hooked up via Matinee.
We hired another guy to take care of the fourth one while I was working on the third which he’s still working on. Now more people from the company saw them and they me want to do a fifth and possibly sixth. Hopefully my brain doesn’t run out of juice o_O
Well if you need another hand, I can make the 3D art, and setup matinee stuff. Im actually meeting with a mortgage company my friend owns this afternoon to maybe make them one of these too. Ill contact you if I need to hire help on it?
) The Avalara introductory logo, and logo design were not done by me.
