The Dive (2020)

In the Fall of 2020, I attended my first Fellowship program with Epic Games to dive into the world of their engine, Unreal. It was a blast, to say the least. Naturally, my focus was animation and virtual photography. The character I worked with was called ECHO, and Epic Games kindly provided “her” as a pre-made asset. So, the fellowship was mostly a technical exercise with impressive, new technology.

If I wanted to tell a “real” version of this story, I’d design more fitting character and environment assets. But, it was an interesting experience to use existing pieces to build the first version of the movie in a relatively short time. Maybe this is previz or conceptual work.

The workflow between Maya and Unreal was still a bit clumsy (back in 2020), but it was already promising. I had to change Echo into a dive suit. I modded textures and added simple geometry for a helmet and fins.
Maya was used for the body animation and the blendshape-based facial animation. The exchange with Unreal worked with FBX files.

Working inside Unreal was fairly straightforward. The workflow was logical, and the experience of having almost all the tools needed at my fingertips was empowering.
I am very interested in virtual photography, so I especially enjoyed the camera setup inside Unreal, which has many references to the real-world physics of cameras and their lenses.

It was also a great exercise to explore the whole process, from writing to storyboarding, recording voice talent, animating cameras and characters, setting up the environment and lighting, and then fine-tuning it all in FinalCut to a complete short movie.