Capstone Game Technical Applications
Playable Character "Aya"
Dynamic Rig & Mocap Compatiblity
Aya is the main playable character for our game development. I created her full body ik and fk rig in Maya using tool help from mGear for some dynamic capabilities.
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Hand shapes using set driven keys
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Mapped skeleton to Maya's ikHuman for easy motion capture retargetting
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Animatable center of gravity pivot
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Dynamic wing controls
In Unreal Engine 5 - Custom Animation Blueprint, Ik trace, & Character VFX
Node Graphs & Blueprints:
Animation Blueprint, State Machine, Foot ik event graph, Foot ik function
Custom Ik Foot Trace Creation
Because this custom character is setup differently from the standard Unreal mannequin, I created a custom ik rig setup for the character in Unreal. I then created a custom ik trace function using blueprints. The feet are placed based on an interpolation between the foot and the ground.
Character Cloth Physics & Dynamic Materials
Cloth physics: Within the animation blueprint I am using nodes to simulate physics based animation and reactivity to the wind forces.
The backpack strings use rigid body physics simulations and trail controllers. The cape uses trail controller. The hood & collar are calculated using anim dynamics.
Dynamic Materials: For visual transition between our two major states (player on ground and player gliding in air), I implemented a method for using dynamic material instances and timelines to hide and show different character accessories.
Overlay Materials: I created three different animated overlay materials distinct with three different colors. Yellow indicates the restore of stamina, red is shown when you are hit by debris, and blue is used on the character when bracing against the wind.
Additive Animations: Leaning (while running & gliding)
First I created a couple poses in Unreal and then added them into a new blendspace. I also created a method in the event graph for getting the character's lean direction.
I connected the additive animation node to the locomotion blendspace inside the locomotion state before connecting it to the output pose.
Pulling in & out with rope animation setup
In this scenario, the player uses the middle mouse scroll wheel to get closer and / or further away from this type of grapple point.
The root motion of the character is being translated here, so animation implementation faced its struggles.
First, I calculated the difference in rotation between the point and the player, so that the player is always facing toward the point. Applied the offset to modify the pelvis bone of the character.
Secondly, I calculated the change in distance from the point. If the change is a positive number then the character uses the pulling in variable and plays the respective animation.
In game cinematic cut scenes
My mission when creating these cut scenes was to not derail the player too far from the gameplay, but to place emphasis on important finds throughout.
These 4 important moments include: gaining the wings and ability to fly, obtaining a new mechanic with finding the pickaxe, finding the giant key, and when unlocking the snake god's chains before the final escape sequence.
Snake God Control Rig
For our main escape sequence at the end of this adventure game, we wanted the Snake God's physical form to be present.
To accomplish this, I created a control rig that was used to animate the snake god mesh inside Unreal Engine.
I used a procedural method to generate fk controls for the joints and utilized the spring physics nodes to effortlessly create the overlapping motion.
Because we created the animation in engine and baked the sequence, we could easily scale to the pre-existing environment.
Tree Root Creation Tool
This tool was created for use in Blender. You can easily draw where you want the root to go and it is adaptively generated.