Ambitious final year project - looking for advice
polycounter lvl 8
Hi guys!!!
I'm about to enter my final year at university and like most creative degrees it requires me to create a final project displaying all my skills.I wanted to suggest my idea for this project and seek some advice.
I hope to make a fan-made game cinematic for Rainbow Six Siege. I plan to make it a freeze frame scene where the characters and objects in my scene aren't actually moving but rather posed and the camera itself will be the animated, similar to the Cyberpunk 2077 cinematic trailer.
For those who havent seen this trailer:
[ame="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs[/ame]
I know planning to make something like this by myself is very ambitious but Im hoping because of the little to no animation and reusing of models within my scene will help make this project a little less impossible
But I wanted to ask the community and professionals of Polycount whether something like this is possible? or I'm just stupid to even consider it?
Also any advise or links to articles and tutorials or anything related to the production of cinematics would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
I'm about to enter my final year at university and like most creative degrees it requires me to create a final project displaying all my skills.I wanted to suggest my idea for this project and seek some advice.
I hope to make a fan-made game cinematic for Rainbow Six Siege. I plan to make it a freeze frame scene where the characters and objects in my scene aren't actually moving but rather posed and the camera itself will be the animated, similar to the Cyberpunk 2077 cinematic trailer.
For those who havent seen this trailer:
[ame="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs[/ame]I know planning to make something like this by myself is very ambitious but Im hoping because of the little to no animation and reusing of models within my scene will help make this project a little less impossible
But I wanted to ask the community and professionals of Polycount whether something like this is possible? or I'm just stupid to even consider it?
Also any advise or links to articles and tutorials or anything related to the production of cinematics would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
Replies
personally I would go for something smaller scale that will allow you to keep the quality level high and more importantly, consistent. also, if you are wanting to become an environment artists I wouldnt focus my time on making characters, or vice versa.
If you're doing it like a CGI render like above, you'll have to factor in things like long render times and what renderer will you be using/vRay/mentalRay/do you have access to more than one computer/a server farm/pay for online rendering etc.
If you're doing it as a game-engine render in something like Unreal Engine 4 using matinee to keyframe the camera movements, then instead of render times you'll have to consider engine constraints and how you can pull off whatever effect you need in it besides camera movements (how to recreate the particle effect of the slow-mo bullets, and how they crush against the skin, would you do that in Post or mess around with UE4's particles and materials, do I basically have the bullet pre-destroyed as a bunch of chunks linked together as a skeleton so they "explode" when crushing or do I try and figure out how to use facial morphs in UE4 for even more deformation, etc.. Biggest thing here is currently UE4 doesn't support vertex-baked animation beyond facial morphs/blendshapes, so it's kind of a bitch to do special types of animations that might of easily worked with animating a simple modifier or script in Max/Maya/whatever.
If your environment truely is static with just cameras moving then that's not a problem. It is noteworthy to point out though that the reason that video "looks cool" is because it actually does have some complex animation going on in it, albeit slow isolated segments until the end.
Ooooh, and if you're doing both an environment AND characters, that's probably going to stretch yourself thin unless it's in a style that's super simple. Pairing up with a partner or four couldn't hurt either if you actually do want characters and environments.
Figure out the scope of what you'd actually be creating, what style are you aiming for, what render-er or engine will you be using, are there any special FX in it or is it all static, what is the duration of the video/piece, will you be creating music, is it silent, or some sort of bought music from a place like audiojungle, what program will you put everything together in for compositing/editing (AfterEffects, Nuke, Premiere, etc.) or is it a real-time application demo.
Anyways my two cents, best of luck with whatever you end up doing!
It's hard to give recommendations when we have no idea of your skill level.
In answer to a few of your questions, the scene will be a single room with 1 hostage , 1 bad guy and possibly 2 SWAT member which will be rendered most likely in MentalRay. i plan to reuse my models and modify them as need be so i could potentially have more characters in my scene although this would most likely be a duplicated model.
I have roughly a year (from now) to plan and produce this project.
There will be indeed a few high res gun models, 2 high res assault rifles and a pistol.
It will most likely be around 20 - 30 seconds
PixelMasher raised a very good point - to pull this off it would have to be high level of quality and doing this alone could really damage the quality and the consistency of the end product.
Unfortunatly I have to create this final year project alone due to ease of marking.
Also thank you for mentioning Render times Deathstick - its something i haden't originally thought about or factored.
Again Thank you for reply, i really appreciate your feedback , you've both given me a lot to consider and dwell on
What jobs are you looking for once you graduate? Character Artist? Environment Artist? Prop Modeler? Whatever your focus is, you should focus on that and make it the best you can. You don't need to make a cinematic cutscene if you're a 3D Artist.
Does it have to be a media piece? Can you just make a couple characters in the universe? Or a fully-fleshed out level?
One suggestion if you're deadset on this idea, see if you can just model/texture and finish the most important models and present them nicely, then finish the cutscene in the summer in your spare time.
- hostage : 2 weeks
- bad guy : 3 weeks
- swat : 1 month
- pistol : 1 week
- assault riffle : 3 weeks
TOTAL : 3 month 1 week
Now let's multiply this by 3 because you are a beginner (I assume you are because you're still at school, sorry if you're not). So it's gonna take you 9 month and 3 weeks just to make these models and you still have to make the environement, the lighting, posing the characters...
Reconsider the scale of this project or you'll just end up with a few half done models.
I now believe a heavy rethink is in order for the project but i would still like to one day produce this as a personal project without the restrictions of the assignment.
I really appreciate the feedback from everyone! You're all awesome
Well, typically less is more. 3-5 projects of a professional quality is much better than 10-12 projects of medium/lower quality.
Obviously portfolios and how they're presented tend to change as someone has more experience. I've seen some very experienced artists just have the list of games they worked on for example, and I've also seen some well-known artists have a ton of killer work, although we're talking mostly over 10 years of xp.
But yeah, ignore that part and aim for quality over quantity. People also tend to have "art overload" when looking at the 15 and up image range. Ideally no more than 10, preferably 5 is what I generally hear.
Have cut the character count to 3, could use same body for both male characters and then just put different color'ed eyes and full headgear on swat guy in a different pose. Would cut character count from 3 to 2.5 (.5 being gear set around base body on SWAT and Bad Guy).
Room would be simple, SUPER basic furniture in room, etc. Room would be of little importance to rest of the scene. I think with good time management and starting ASAP, you could absolutely obtain a quality piece within a year. Absolutely.