Would using Copyrighted Models in an Educational Portfolio for Animation Purposes be bad form?
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I am a student applying for college, and while working and rendering out some of the animation work I have available it occurred to me I've used quite a few models from various game franchises. This raised a red flag to me in my head. Now, I've seen people use models from copyrighted content in their demo reels before, but considering this is for my college application, I wanted to make sure I did this right. Does it fall under fair use to use rigs and models from a commercial product, for instance, Halo 5, in a project that's purpose is to simply show the capabilities of the animator, if proper credit to the company who created the assets (in this case it would be Bungie)? Do keep in mind, this is not for a commercial job, nor will I claim any of these models as my own work. As a followup as well, if you believe this to be acceptable, if I were to use these models, what would be the best way to credit the places where these models came from? Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to hearing from those with more experience than me on this matter! 
Replies
Just make sure to credit them. At the end of the reel is fine.
My personal preference when seeing an animator's reel is to see the models rendered without textures. Just single-color shaded models.
That way the focus is more on form, deformation, poses, and motion. Less distracting. And more obvious that this is about animation, not about textures & lighting.
For example Stephen Vyas' work
https://www.google.com/search?q=stephen+vyas+gif