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The list included over 200 entries ranging from funny cartoony animations to amazingly realistic scenes. Animators had to make a fully-fledged animated scene using the character rig and audio clip provided by Unreal Engine. The audio was a fragment of a scene from episode 6, season 2 of What We Do in the Shadows: "You took me for a fool. You swindled me. I have spent 167 years searching for you. And now, ho ho ho! Satisfaction will be mine."
The rest was totally up to the contestants, they could play with the 11-second story however they wanted. Some of them came up with hilarious ideas, the others chose to go dark, some decided to focus on the character, the others built entire cinematic scenes around an 11-second audio fragment.
This contest was open to literally anyone and everyone as Unreal Engine had prepared a compilation of free online courses for those who are not familiar with animation in Unreal Engine at all. The team adds that "while 220 animators entered into the challenge, thousands took up the chance to simply take the courses and learn more."
Tobias Noller's incredible facial animation that looked like it was taken from a movie scene won the competition. It was fully rendered and post-produced in Unreal Engine 5. Though Tobias had never animated in Unreal Engine, the creator has been in the games industry for around 8 years now and is currently working as a Senior Visual Effects Artist at Ninja Theory.
You can read Unreal Engine's interview with the winner and see other entries here. Don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.