Capstone | Jordyn Marie Art

Playable Character "Aya"
Maya, mGear, IKHuman

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. Her accessories such as her cape and long backpack strings were created with physics based real-time spring joint chains to visualize animated physics.

Hand shapes using set driven keys
Mapped skeleton to Maya's ikHuman for easy motion capture retargetting
Animatable center of gravity pivot

Inside Unreal

Ik foot trace

Because this custom character is setup differently from the standard Unreal mannequin, I created a custom ik rig setup for the character in Unreal. This allowed me to then create a custom function inside the animation blueprint for the character to have ik trace on the ik feet. With this ik trace, the feet are placed based on an interpolation between the foot and the ground.

Rigid body physics

Because the environment is meant to immerse the player into a storm, we wanted elements to be reactive to these conditions. The backpack strings use rigid body physics simulations to give a realistic feel to these meshes and provide the capability for them to be reactive to the wind velocity and direction in game.

Dynamic material instance animation between ground and air state

For visual transition between our two major states (player on ground, player flying in air), I implemented a method for using dynamic material instances and animation curves to hide and show different character accessories. The actual transition shown here is a basic example of this capability. For now a glow and fade effect are accomplishing the show and hide aspect for these elements.

The animation sequences utilizing this vfx transition contain animated material curves, connecting directly to the parameter values inside the dynamic material instances.

Node Graphs & Blueprints:

Animation Blueprint, State Machine, Foot ik event graph, Foot ik function