Animation Link: https://mega.nz/file/t2BgBQZL#tKZUy.....pdcHkYLoBtveQI

Bonus Quasi-Aftermath Loop: https://mega.nz/file/0iY21IoT#FXgOW.....nSCykjmezy4mVo

Marvin Moosebeef finds himself motivated to work out for longer when he knows he's being watched, especially by someone like Rec. Like usual, however, he finds that the snake tends to shrink down whenever he gets too flustered around the moose. This particular night, Marvin decides to try out an idea to break the shrinking curse, or at least have some fun teasing him with it.


This was supposed to be a small quick animation I swear. Nearly two months ago, I had the idea of Marvin picking up a shrunken Rec and kissing him to make him grow back up to normal size. As far as my imagine was concerned at the time, it just happened in a black void, and doing that would have been so much easier, but of course my stupid brain had to wonder "where are they and how did Rec start shrinking down this time?" Thus, I put them in the gym because Marvin works out, and of course Rec would shrink watching Marvin pumping iron, and of course Marvin wouldn't be aware of it until after he finished up his workout, and so everything just started falling into place from there. Of course animating all 80 seconds of this thing took friggen forever and despite my intial attempt at planning ahead I still ended up with something of a mess trying to string together smaller, loopabale animations (like Marvin's bench press reps) with regular cinematic ones (basically everything after he puts the barbell away), but it all turned out okay in the end.

Working with camera cuts and camera animation in UE4 is pretty unwieldy, as unlike with character animations, importing an animated camera from Maya just dumps the keyframes all into the sequence so it's difficult to update the animation without having to delete all of the keys and then import them all over again. I also had an infuriating issue last-minute with the lighting that was incredibly tedious to fix because I ended up having to fix the same light in three different places and somehow the changes I had made kept getting reset for a while, but I have an idea of what caused that and can probably avoid it in the future.

All in all, I bit off way more than I could chew with this one, and I definitely don't plan on making anything near this ambitious again anytime soon, but I also learned a lot! I'm starting to get the idea behind moving holds, which can really smooth out movements and keep characters from freezing stock-still, and I'm getting some experience with animating characters physically interacting, which isn't quite as hard as I had feared but still takes a lot of work.

The background environment is from https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-mo.....orts-equipment