For the final sprint, I battled a melting computer to test and retime the animation of the good ending. I was happy to be a part of a great team of artists who were the best part of this project. While I have soured on VR, the friends I made along the way were the best thing to come out of this project.
This sprint I continued retiming and bug fixing the animations in Unreal. As the professors noticed I had a lot of trouble getting the game to a playable state on my machine but I finally figured out how to stop the issues I was having. Now I can make sure the Scientist is timed up correctly to the audio and robot.
This sprint I finished up cleaning and editing the mocap animation for Victor. Next I have to retime it up so that it matches our dialogue in our game. I may have to add idles to allow for time to pass between lines.
This sprint I worked on cleaning up Victor's mocap animations inside of Motion Builder. I also managed to set up Unreal Live Link with Motion Builder so I can preview what it will appear as in game in real time as I move the rig around inside of Motion Builder.
This Sprint I focused on the timing of the good ending lining up with the dialogue for our robot in engine. I was able to line it up pretty well once I fine tuned and tweaked the animation to match the speed of the dialogue.
This sprint I worked on finishing up the good ending animation. It is a 1600 frame animation with multiple different poses and supporting movements. It was tied to our dialogue we have recorded and changed into a stomp to get out of the lab rather than a pick up a grate motion.
This sprint I worked on the timing and animation for the Robot's Good Ending in our VR Cyberstein experience. I uploaded multiple audio files into Maya and animated around the sound clips that our game utilizes.
Here is a 4th pass of my exaggeration animation I have so far. I referenced Pete Townsend of The Who for the windmill and eventual guitar smash.
This Sprint is my first on the Cyberstein team since my previous Tangled team's project was cut. I have worked on being integrated into the team and understanding the scope of the project now that there are two animators including myself on the team. My first task is to cleanup the motion capture animations on the scientist and I started on that by giving him a control rig and will be cleaning up the graph editor for the animations.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/fieavr-cyberstein/505137
This sprint, I worked alongside the other animators and tech artists to compile, bugfix, and fill out the animation blueprint and state machine. I also helped pose a few more still frame poses to fill out the state machine animation changes that we will have in the final game.
This week I created poses of Pascal that will be examples of what our final model and rig will show during our VR experience. I also made an animation that displays how when the player interacts with Pascal, he will jump from the dock to the side of the boat, and then land on the cushion in front of the player. Our project now has the elements of the beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the dock area with Pascal waving, the middle is the player being instructed by Pascal to row towards the center of the lake, and the end is the player and Pascal observing the lantern festival until the scene fades to black.
This week I figured out a lot of the timing basics I was missing in my older iterations of my quadruped walk cycle. Next I need to work on the tail swing and giving him a more impactful fidget than just a blink.
This week the animators on the team got together and made a list of animations that we plan will be in our final VR experience. We currently have 36 animations planned and are working with the tech artists on the team to see what more might be possible. We also started using a practice model and rig until our final Pascal model is ready to animate. I did a animation that will be referenced for when Pascal changes color.
This week I completed my first ever walk and run cycle for a quadruped. I chose to use a Balto rig because I love the character so hopefully as I learn how to make the animation better I can give him some justice.
This is my presentation I created in Adobe After Effects to show off my two best animations in the fall semester at FIEA. Included are my jump and lift animations.
This is a quick video where I experimented with a lot of new techniques and animation tools. I got to animate facial controls which allowed me to give true character to my actor. I also got to learn about constraints in Maya and how they can help lock FK rigs in place for translation.
I had a blast making this animation and love how it came out. I got to emphasize the wright transfer of the crate and also add a stylized accent to the end of the animation.This is a Jump animation that allowed me to focus on the core mechanics of a humanoid jumping. I decided to have fun with it and have two basketball players jump, however one gets to dunk over the other.
I learned a lot through this process and enjoyed my time creating this piece.This was our last week to set up our proxies for our VR project in Unreal. I helped figure out the spline for the path of our boat that we want the player to follow and animation proxies using a rig my teammate created.
This week me and my team continued production on our VR project. I personally continued making proxies and fully implemented an oar model that was taken through the art pipeline into the Unreal environment.
