Showreel Analysis

For this post I want to briefly analyse some other showreels created by either students or those in the VFX industry, the purpose of this being that to take inspiration and generate ideas when creating my own final showreel.

This first showreel is mainly based around 3D modelling & animation, I will mainly be analysing the modelling section, as I do not plan on doing any complex animations for my own showreel.

One of the first things I noticed about this showreel was that he does not list the software used for creating these models, aside from this the showreel itself is relatively simple, the way he displays is models is by having them do a 360 spin with a plain background and one light source directly over the top of the model, he then goes through the wireframe, shaded and textured views. I think this is a very effective way of showing off the models, as there is no other distracting elements to the scene, so the viewer can purely focus on the technical ability on display. This fits in with what I was told by my point of contact at Escape Studios, who also said that a simple rotation of the model would suffice when creating my showreel.

This next showreel is based around compositing, but I will be focusing on the camera projection section so I can get some ideas for displaying my own camera projection in my showreel. The software used for this shot is Maya.

The first section is the final render of the scene, the camera does a quick pan and rotate around the scene and is quite effective in showing the 3D element of the scene. For the breakdown it goes through the original image, the 3D mesh and a pan around the viewport of the projection to show off the areas not visible in the render. For my own final showreel I plan on heavily using photoshop to display the work that goes into my projection, so as well potentially including some of the shots used in the above showreel, I will also try to transition through the different layers I make in photoshop.

This showreel is based around matchmoving, something that I also plan on displaying in my own showreel. The software used for this showreel is 3D equaliser and Maya, slightly different to my own plans for matchmoving, as I plan on using blender for compatibility reasons.

The way the shots are displayed in the reel are by first using cones to show where the tracking markers are in the scene, then using a checker pattern to cover any objects or surfaces within the scene, I think this is a very effective way of displaying the tracks as it can show off the accuracy of a track very well. One downside to this showreel is that the tracks themselves are not very good, you can plainly see the tracked 3D text towards the end is lifting up from the floor and generally just not following the cameras movement.

Overall, briefly analysing these showreels has helped to get a better picture in my head of what shots I should use when taking all of my final exports and placing them into premiere for my final output this semester.

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