Scrap - Short Film
"Scrap" was the final film for the AIE Seattle VFX class of 2021. Assets were built and animated in Maya, textured with Substance Suite. The project was rendered in Unreal Engine, and composited with Nuke. We were a team of four, working entirely remote due to Covid. We all wore a lot of hats; I was primarily the artistic director and rigger, though I ended up spending time doing some of everything, including lighting and general Unreal work, animation, sound and video editing.
The final edit of the short film. I produced the sound, and did the final editing, among my other work on the small team.
Not only topologizing and rigging the dog, but rigging it to be correctly imported into Unreal engine, took a lot of trial and experimentation.
The rig is mechanical, with almost all weights at 100%, but pivots had to be set incredibly precisely for the mechanics to look legitimate enough.
From concepts developed by a teammate, I created a series of holographic ads, mostly using visuals from Maya renders of objects sculpted for the purpose. I also developed and iterated the shaders they used.
Other assets I built include the mechanical arm and background room for the vet/mechanic's office, as well as the bulk of the Unreal lighting work for all the scenes.