Finding a practice place isn’t that easy. At least I felt it was a maze. Despite my best efforts, I never got an official practice during my XR-Design studies. But I ended up, for an extremely short time, to do something for an extremely small company called the Radical Rabbit. I followed some hearsay and rumors as I felt my way, rather blindly, in search for a practice place.

The Rabbits turned out to be two highly ambitious little rodents. Very kind and organized too. They have labeled themselves as a New Media Experience Agency, at their Instagram account. I failed to find their web pages. Again. I remembered already back then in Spring 2021 that the pages were a bit of a challenge to locate, but a classmate had told they were nice people, and the office was located basically on the campus.

And they were nice. I hope the enterprise is still in existence.

They gave me the chance to explore Unreal Engine’s (a game engine) new feature called Meta Human, which was then still in testing and not properly launched quite yet. My poor little (and usually very high performing) laptop had hard time with these extremely realistic and fully rigged human models. (I was at home, since, due to the pandemic, remote work was still the standard)

I don’t know if Unreal Engine 4 is the best place to start animating, but I started there. And during my practice, that never became a practice, I learned more than in the whole academic year before that. I learned the basics of animating, something of different sound formats (and especially which of them Unreal Engine deigned to swallow) and to pack image sequences and soundtracks together in Blender into a presentable mp4. (Not to mention all the little tricks I found out inside Unreal Engine in general.)

I’m not at all sure my time with the Rabbits proved useful for them. But the time was beneficial for me and I did try to wrap up my findings in a nice little PDF that at least gave them an idea where to start and what errors to expect when working with Meta Humans.

It was a month I am grateful for. Worth five credits on a degree I never completed.

Worth learning, and happy times with nice people.