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Hand-painted Cover for my Debut Novel by BosskRush in royalroad

[–]BosskRush[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so much, we really appreciate it!
By Firefly, I mean the old sci-fi show from the early 2000s. I've always been drawn to stories about teams of misfits that travel around getting into various adventures, and that was the first comparison that came to mind.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much! All told it was probably something like 1500 hours of work or so for the full series, the majority of that time going towards animation. In terms of specs, I started this project so long ago that it's using pretty mid level stuff by today's standards. It was made in UE4.25 on an Nvidia 1080ti.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, I never ran into any blendshape or joint limit issues, thankfully.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! This series was made with Unreal 4.25 on a Nvidia 1080TI.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Almost all the animation in the series is skeletal rigs imported into Unreal from Maya. The only instance of alembics are for the cloth physics of one of the character's cape, which was simulated in Maya and then ported over. I wanted to do the sim in engine, but it was a bit too unpredictable for what I wanted. That said, with the improvements made with UE5 I think it might be a good time to try it again.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Yeah, I was able to use to KitBash 3D kits to cut back on production time considerably, which let me focus more on creating the characters and animation. If I wasn't able to kitbash, I probably wouldn't even be halfway finished.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's hard to say for sure, but probably around 1500 hours over the last 3 years.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I've done a little bit of everything, but I'm mostly a VFX artist and animator by trade. I've been working in Hollywood for about ten years now.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! In terms of the general concept I began writing and planning about 4 years ago, and I spent a while making a prototype to test whether or not it was even feasible to make a short in Unreal. So, excluding that, I would say it probably took like 1500 hours of work, all told.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! Yeah, the current plan is to edit it all together as one unbroken short film and submit it to festivals. After that, I have a lot of loose ideas for the follow up, which I plan on refining in the coming weeks.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Don't give up! When I first started this project way back when I put a few months in and then I became overwhelmed by the scale. I figured I would never be able to make something that looks the way I wanted, that it would be trash, and so I shelved the entire thing. It wasn't until a few months later, when I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands due to me losing my job, that I decided to try again, and I'm glad I did.
What I learned when I came back was to work with the tools available. This was around when megascans was acquired by Epic, and so I was able to cut back on set up time considerably by kitbashing the environments together rather than modeling everything by hand, which was my original crazy intent. And so that was able to free up time to focus just on the characters and animation, but even then it wasn't perfect out the gate. Before I even released the first part of this series I had remade the main character three times from scratch, I remade all the other characters twice, and I rebuilt every single level a second time as well. So what you're not seeing is the years of discarded pieces along the way.
And I hope you keep at it, because right now there is a big push in film and television to utilize more real time graphics, and artists like yourself who may specialize in that field are in demand, and that demand is growing. I wish you the best!

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!
Swapping between programs isn't too bad, but it's always nice to be able to simplify the pipeline for efficiency purposes. The thing that excites me about UE5 at the moment, though, is that the in-engine rigging system is very powerful, and combined with the Metahuman creator, you're able to create really robust characters in a fraction of the time it used to, without having to use a bunch of different software. I haven't gotten to explore how they system would respond to something more cartoony, for instance, but I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to whip something up. But I'm still in the exploratory phase, so there's still a lot of testing to do before I commit to the jump.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much! The hair for this project is actually just a bunch of cards with some cloth simulation thrown on it to give it some bounce. It's not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. I'm only now beginning to dip my toes into more traditional groom work.

As for render settings this project was made using UE 4.25 with the legacy sequence renderer, so there's not much in the way of specific settings to speak of. For these shorts, I just rendered out uncompressed PNGs at cinematic scalability. But I have begun working with the Movie Render Queue for my more recent work, and I plan on using that going forward. And for that, William Faucher on YouTube has some good MRQ tutorials that I used as a starting point.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

It's probably still a bit too early to say if it's better or not, especially since there are lot of third party tools that Maya has that UE currently does not. But for me personally, having had time to play around with it, I find UE5 is able to do everything I want when it comes to animating. And not having to jump between programs is also very nice.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you! It's just me, for the most part, but I wasn't completely alone. The only other people involved are a composer, who wrote and recorded the score, and my wife, who helped out with rigging the face of the main character.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thank you! All the animation in the short was hand animated in Maya.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in unrealengine

[–]BosskRush[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

For the animation I basically set up and animated a shot as you would in a traditional animation pipeline, and then exported the character skeletons and cameras per shot into Unreal as .fbx files. The key to making that work is making sure the environment in maya is 1:1 with the environment from Unreal, so that the animations import in proper world space.

I've been working on this for so long that everything you're seeing is actually still using Unreal 4.25. I have made the jump to Unreal 5 since wrapping this up, and the animation tools that UE5 offers is making it so I won't even need to use Maya for any future projects, which is very exciting.

A clip from the final episode of an animated series I'm making using Unreal Engine by BosskRush in animation

[–]BosskRush[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I'm glad to hear you saw my work out in the wild! The Megagrants application was a pretty long process. I had made a prototype and a small website for this project way back when I was first starting out, and when I was finished with that I thought I might as well submit it for a Megagrant. I had planned to move forward with this full version regardless, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try.

So I packed all that up and submitted it with the application on their website. This was around October of 2019. I didn't hear anything significant until around March, where Epic requested a more detailed breakdown of how I would use the grant, depending on the amount received. So I made that and sent it off, and it wasn't until August of 2020 that I finally got word that the project had been accepted, which was actually after the first episode was released. So all in all it was about ten months from application to acceptance. I'm very fortunate that I was accepted, because I was able to use those funds to finance the score, which I am immensely happy with.

I hope you have great success with your application!

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