Animation Tutorial: How to Capture and Render Your Project

Professional Voxel artist and animator Zach Soares explains how to capture an animation for online distribution

A digital portfolio, on social media or a personal website, is one of the best tools an animator has for finding work. Knowing how to share your animations online quickly and professionally can be the difference between your work being taken seriously or not.

Zach Soares is the creative director of animation studio Bunnyhug s and a professional voxel artist and animator with almost a decade of experience. In this tutorial, he shares a simple way of capturing and rendering an animation project so that it can be published and shared online successfully.

1. Prep the shoot

First, you will want to record the animation you have made. Zach recommends using OBS, a free screen recording software.

Create a new section on OBS to record what you have created in Unity. In the program, you can tailor the settings depending on your needs. Remember that MP4 is often the best format for videos that will be published on social media.

Then, record your animation.

2. Record

Now that you have a video of your sequence, import it into your editing software.

If you are using After Effects, you can adjust the dimensions of your recording by going to Composition Settings and changing the width and height to remove anything beyond the frame of your animation.

3. Cut and encode

To create a seamless loop, edit the video so that your character starts and ends in the same location. If you are publishing to Twitter, Zach’s preferred social media platform, keep your video fewer than 15 seconds long.

Finally, if you are using After Effects, press Add to Media Encoder Queue, set your video format as h.264, and ensure that the source bitrate is matched. Then, all that is left to do is to press play.

Did you enjoy this tutorial? Check out Zach Soares’s online course, Introduction to Voxel Art for Character Design to learn how to think outside the box and bring your characters to life with Qubicle, Maya or Blender, and Unity.

You may also like:

- Introduction to ZBrush, a course by Luis Alberto Gayoso Berrospi
- Blender for Beginners, a course by Carlos Sifuentes Haro
- Cinema 4D for Character Creation, a course by Aarón Martínez