Kinetic Rush Animation Challenge

Containment Day 4

Animation challenge entry for pwnisher’s Kinetic Rush Animation Challenge
Done in Unreal Engine 5.4
Total work time: 60+hrs

CONCEPT
Containment is inspired by Alien Romulus that released 2 weeks ago as of submitting this entry.
It's a dire 5-second clip where an engineer attempts to escape the Science facility he works in. It is here that a deadly virus has escaped and has begun infecting others hosts, turning them rabid and violent. The scene depicts just one space within a larger facility where the Engineering corporation, who manages the facility, is into its 4th day of ‘Containment’.

Environment Design
Major Kitbashing of some Quixel assets and heavy usage of existing Epic games Marketplace assets for the environmental design. Namely the Factory Environment Collection.
Coming from an Architecture & spatial design background, I spent the majority of the working hours on the scenic design.
A vastly different spatial quality was intended between the two main spaces. One constricting and inside, the other expansive and outside.

Animation
Apart from the 6 provided animations to choose from, I added a control rig to the main character to allow for additive modification to the existing ‘charge’ animation template. I have Josh Toonen to thank for his One-Click’ Control rig that greatly eased this process. The added Animations include the Hand scanning, Head turning and Head ducking moments of the clip. Retargeting was a major feature employed thanks to the ease afforded with the new release of UE5.4
Additional animations such as crawling and falling were added from the Mixamo catalogue.

Characters
A mixture of Mixamo characters & Paragon: Crunch were used to populate the scene.

Lighting
Lighting was another component where I spent some time understanding and tweaking. A largely dark environment meant lights were to be used sparingly and wisely at intentional points. Volumetric Scattering was another tool used in creating the atmosphere of the scene.

Sound Effects/SFX
I admit I do need to work on the SFX aspect, although the challenge itself is judged solely on visuals.
The multitude of sound actors in the 5 second scene easily led me to a noisy, loud & slightly overly cramped result. I’ll aim to improve on this for future work.

Post Production
Done in Davinci Resolve Studio. Color Correction, Vignetting, Contrast, Glow.
It’s only my 8/9th time using Davinci but the non destructive workflows really make it an easy tool to pick up.