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 - Custom Animation Blueprint, Ik trace, & Dynamics
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
The levels aim to immerse the player into a storm environment. In the animation blueprint I am using rigid body, trail controller, and anim dynamics 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 and the hood is calculated using anim dynamics.
Dynamic Material Instance Animation Between States
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 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.
Additive Animations: Leaning (while running)
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.
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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.
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The root motion of the character is being translated here, so animation implementation faced its struggles.
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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.
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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.
Node Graphs & Blueprints:
Animation Blueprint, State Machine, Foot ik event graph, Foot ik function
