Advice for our digital animation applicants

We will be looking for strong character and environment designs (either drawn digitally or traditionally) and also evidence of storytelling via storyboards or comics. Demonstrate colour and compositional skills in your paintings. For applicants keen to create comics we’d like to see lots of examples of the comics you’ve created so far. If you’ve been thinking about starting a webcomic series then get started with publishing episodes online via a site like webtoons.com and include some examples of these in your portfolio. In the industry concept artists are also expected to be confident working with 3D, so we also wish to see some engagement with 3D software. We would recommend Blender or Zbrush for making digital sculptures of characters or creatures, for more details please read the 3D animation section.

Firstly, you need to love drawing. We really want to see your character designs. Have you tried animating with software such as Adobe Animate? Make sure you’ve drawn some frame by frame animation in Animate, not just tweening. A demo copy of Animate can be downloaded from Adobe's website. If you need a free 2D animation package then Blender Foundation’s Blender software (which is a 3D programme) also contains 2D animation functionality using its grease pencil tool. When you install it, make sure you set the interface to use the industry standard shortcuts (this will make learning additional animation programmes later an easier experience).

Animate a human figure in a looping walk, run and also a jump animation. Consider trying two characters interacting with each other, or a character interacting with a prop. Work through Richard Williams’ 'Animator’s Survival Kit', or other great animation books like Preston Blair’s ‘Cartoon Animation’ and Tony White’s ‘The Animator’s Workbook’. You don’t need to create a five minute epic film to show us – we’d rather see short high quality clips of animation than long mediocre quality work.

Please create some real time 3D artwork, either a modification of an existing game where you might create your own playable level from game assets, or preferably examples of your own 3D models in a game editor. We recommend Unreal Engine, but Unity is also a good engine. Unreal has the strongest online community for help. Please read the advice for applicants to 3D animation and visual effects for additional artwork and software recommendations. We also enjoy seeing interactive functions that you have made in a game engine.

If you are applying for 3D animation and visual effects, games art and design or concept art degrees you should have spent at least a month using a 3D programme to ensure that you enjoy the experience. We recommend Blender Foundation’s Blender – it is free. When you install it make sure you set the interface to use the industry standard shortcuts (this will make learning additional 3D programmes later an easier experience).

If you are particularly interested in modelling characters or creatures then look into the sculpting functions inside Blender. They are not as powerful as Pixologic’s Zbrush, but there is no free version of this software.

If you are interested in becoming a character animator, you can download free rigs for Blender. Rigs are the digital skeletons that you work with as an animator that make your character move. Start learning how to place keyframes and animate them and show us the results.

Other free 3D software that is worth looking into (especially if you are applying to 3D animation and visual effects or 3D games art and design) is SideFX’s Houdini Apprentice especially if you are interested in learning about effects such as fire, water, destruction simulations, cloth simulations and magical effects.

If you are new to 3D then try Blender first; Houdini has a steeper learning curve but is the industry standard for effects work and simulations. Try to build objects that you can get easy reference for (items in your home for example) and when you feel more confident then move onto buildings, vehicles or characters and consider texturing and lighting them if you can. Always model from reference – either photos or your own designs; don’t model from your imagination.

If you are interested in visual effects then make sure you have attempted some basic compositing of 3D renders into photos or preferably into live action film, and blend them as seamlessly as possible. We recommend Foundry Nuke for compositing (the only free version is currently function limited), but Black Magic Design’s Fusion is a good free alternative for learning node-based compositing. Photography is a real plus as a skill. Show evidence of composition and lighting in your photos, not holiday snaps.