Seeking Sanctuary
As Lead Animator for the Sci-Fi teaser trailer 'Seeking Sanctuary', my role was to handle the hand-animated assets, such as Eden the robot, and the Tarkiek, a feline apex predator. Animating creatures of any shape or size is one of the biggest challenges for animators. I was excited to tackle this head on and have gained a lot of technical and creative experience in the process.
Perfectly blending technology and creativity, SEEKING SANCTUARY is a suspenseful and futuristic sci-fi thriller that follows Blake, an exiled space rogue, as she ventures onto The Ark in search of the renowned Tarkiek egg. She discovers that the once bustling zoological tourist hotspot is now home to a ferocious being and a devious little robot.
UE5 Film Competition
With the release of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games hosted a short film competition for studios and universities within Australia, with Massey University being some of the first to enter the competition from New Zealand.
The competition took place May - July, with each team having 8 weeks to produce a 1-8min short film, using only digital assets. We were lucky enough to take part in the competition, considering it a dry run for our major project above. Using Epics Meta-Humans and UE marketplace assets, we were able to create the short.
I worked on the motion capture cleanup, using Autodesk Motionbuilder, alongside any miscellaneous tasks that needed to be hand-animated. The finished product is a little rough around the edges, but it made for massive improvement for our Major Project.
The short film is a prequel to what we see in the Seeking Sanctuary trailer, following the commanding officers of the ark moments before its decent into chaos.
Eden
The robot Eden was animated in Maya, alongside a facial animation using a MASH network. The body animation was imported into UE as an FBX and the facial animation was rendered separately in Maya, then used as a media texture in Unreal.
Shot Progression
The Tarkiek
A deadly feline creature, the Tarkiek was the main antagonist for the “Seeking Sanctuary” project. I animated the motion in Maya and imported the rig into Unreal for the scene assembly and rendering. The models and environment were created by other members of my team.
