Spike! my entry into Search for a Star by Grads in Games

Jan 2019

GRADS IN GAMES, SEARCH FOR A STAR - GAME ANIMATION & VFX STAGE 2 ENTRY

Alex McCunn ABERTAY UNIVERSITY @iforgethowtoread

Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................2 The Idea ..........................................................................................................................................................3 Planning ..........................................................................................................................................................3 Production ......................................................................................................................................................8 Post Production ............................................................................................................................................15 Conclusion & Reflection ................................................................................................................................18 References ....................................................................................................................................................19

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Introduction As part of the Search for a Star competition run by Grads in Games, this document serves the purpose of re-telling the process I conducted when creating my entry for stage two of the game animation & VFX category. After participating in the Digital Rising Star portion of the competition last year, in conjunction with Sumo Digital, I wanted to go above and beyond my skill level and really push myself in terms of both artistic and technical know-how. All criteria has been met to the best of my abilities and all work featured within this document is of my work unless stated otherwise.

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The Idea In order to push my entry to the next level, I began to research what elements were featured in the winning entries from the previous round of entries that became the finalists before which included Rose Summer and Callum Batty’s entries.

Figure 1 - SFAS entry by Rosie Summers

Figure 2 - SFAS entry by Callum Batty

Both of their characters had unique appeals to them and ranged from intricate back stories to smooth and clean animations. I wanted to bring together the best elements from both when creating my entry, which included using some of the same tools as well.

Last year my entries were not up to the standard I wanted them to be and they were lacking in charm, charisma, visual appeal and above all, effort. This time around I endeavoured to approach my work with more care and passion, which I would generate down into my character, in order to show what I am capable of as an animator.

Planning As with any process when bringing a creature to life, I had to choose which creature that was. I began by simplifying the selection by locating character rigs that were available online from animator Keil Figgins.

Figure 1 - Rig Selection via Keil Figgins website

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Their character rigs were some that I had been recommended to look at for their ease of use for a game engine, which was required by the brief. This narrowed down the selection to one rig that looked nimble, light hearted, fun to play with and most importantly game ready.

Figure 2 - Wake rig by Keil Figgins

After selecting a rig I began to brainstorm what approaches I could take to creating four animation sequences found within a game character. These sketches were the idea I had that stood out the most in terms of everything I wanted the character to be able to do. He was to jump high, be confident, stride without fear and be an expert with a sword. The idea began to change form the more I drew and it would be apparent that visual effects would need to be incorporated for the final piece when all tied together.

This was evident in the platforms I had him jumping from, interacting with and impacts when landing on the ground from high up.

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Extra thought was put into deciding how exactly my character would make their way back to the beginning if they were to attack again once the sequence had ended. Initially I thought about him using the magic he would use to summon platforms to teleport back to the start. Another one was to have the character summon more panels to run across in the style of a parkour ‘wall-run’. Both ideas were worthy enough to be used but ultimately I took an alternative approach once again. I also explored the range of emotions I could portray on his face while in combat or while relaxing.

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Timing and particle effects were among those examined along with the characters personality.

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While sketching allowed me to get ideas down on paper, testing and rig within Autodesk Maya to understand its limitations and strengths proved to be a valuable allocation of time as well.

A clear emotion of strength and control was what emanated from the character as I created these poses.

He would be cocky and bold, ready to fight and ready to show off when he could. His name would later become Spike.

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Production My first step in nailing the timing of my actions was to create short animatics that conveyed the basic poses I wished to replicate and portray in Spike.

This method of timing the beats to a 3D animation can be time consuming if not used appropriately but in this past I have found it to be useful and a quick way for me to achieve the right timings in places where 3D might have taken longer to do. Eventually this would translate into the 3D environment in the form of blocking the poses.

Each state of Spike had his poses blocked in Maya and then timed acordinly to match the animatics as closely as possible.

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Playblasts were exported after every work day in order to reflect on what needed to be fixed and completed for the next. This would also allow me to include the process in my final presentation videos as well.

As I was creating these sequnces in Maya I tested the practicality of importing the character into the game engine and getting it to work with a short idle motion. This test proved to be extremely useful as it allowed me to also experiment with applying the additional materials and textures that came with the rig when purchased such as the metalic and ambient occluision files.

What proceeded next was exporting the animations out and getting them to work within Unreal and used within a state machine.

What resulted after this was a very pleasing moment to know that I had been able to get a game character into and engine and have their animations play in sequence and on loop, ready to be used for any purpose.

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The visual effects were added to enhance the scene and convey the idea of Spike having more control of his surroundings and have some more weight to him with impact clouds. These were influenced by tutorials found online that assisted me in creating these assets one step at a time having never done them before in Unreal. While I still have much more to learn about creating stunning visual effects, I have been introduced to another method of animating that is very intricate and different in its approach. The platform images were created in Adobe Photoshop and exported out as PNGs.

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I have been able to achieve the effects that I wanted based off of my concepts but would definitely be inclined to try this production method again for future projects in order to go bigger and better.

Post Production After completing the project I began to prepare it for presentation via the Grads in Games Itch.io page for the competition. I wanted to portray Spike the best way I could while also having the camera angles be versatile and have each be able to switch between themselves for editing.

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I used the cinematic matinee editor in order to key the trails of the cameras and get the timings similar on their movements. The screen capturing software XSplit was used to record the camera angles as the scenes played out. I located a blueprint for switching between the cameras online that helped in jumping between the different shots when needed.

This footage was taken into Sony Vegas Pro to be edited together to display my process and allow me to export each individual part out for viewing purposes.

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The animations themselves were exported again using the AnimExport tool from Keil Figgins which included their meshes and were uploaded to sketch fab to be viewed along side the videos that additionally would be uploaded to YouTube.

While the textures and materials for these were not made visible the animation sequences themselves that made up the state machine with Unreal have been put on display to be viewed from all angles.

Lastly all that was needed to be completed was to upload this documentation to the online viewing service Issuu. This would ensure that all the details about my work could be seen and read to give more context to my work without having to download any files.

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Conclusion & Reflection Overall I am pleased with my submission and have learned a lot from pushing my work further as a creator. This year for my final honours project I will be creating an animated short using VR animation toolkits like ANIMVR to create and edit the project. This is primarily to demonstrate the versatility these packages have and how they are in the area of up and coming animation technologies in which studios are preparing to use when they become the standard.

The major issues that I came across with the project ultimately came down to scale and time. As I included additional steps in my process like the sketching I ended up pushing back other tasks that I could have gotten to quicker and have more time dedicated to them instead. The 2D animatic as well can be viewed as an unnecessary step when creating a 3D functioning asset but the more that I use this process to formalise my ideas in the future I will get more efficient at doing it and stop it from becoming a tedious task.

The animations themselves were created in a way so that I could edit each part individually without having to change every element of them and cause further disruption. However where I lacked in secondary details I attempted to make up for in overall appeal and visual readability. Taking more time in the future to animate those additional details like the facial expressions, straps and individual fingers will make them stand out more and have even greater finer appeal overall.

As texturing and material assignment has always been a weakness of mine I learned a lot about how metallic and ambient occlusion textures worked in game engines and how they can enhance the details of the characters. While the Sketchfab submissions lack any textures, my attempt at setting them up in Maya and Unreal have taught me more about what to focus on for next time.

However having made the effort to dedicate my time to creating a functioning characters using animations and having it work within a game engine will be a valuable perk when creating my final showreel this year upon my graduation. I will definitely be using this as an example of the level of skill I am currently at as both an animator and a technical artist.

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References https://www.pngkey.com/maxpic/u2w7q8t4r5t4a9o0/ https://callumjb.itch.io/sfas-animation-callumjbattyhttps://summersr.itch.io/search-for-a-star-rosie-summers-robot http://www.3dfiggins.com/Store/ https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1339323?referral=kielfiggins https://twitter.com/croa_san/status/1037997885319733248 https://twitter.com/croa_san/status/1027191785100136448 https://twitter.com/croa_san/status/1027539968292478977 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyhLQBBPmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrnCLj4lYI https://imgur.com/Kp70CLC https://imgur.com/A0FQjLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqSIgsO2lr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE0EbWdnjTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QKK2o5rWSQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6hq4EORDmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGfeCVbfVtc https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8f/b8/1b/8fb81b99528a5bb048996da2a4f4e8cd.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d2/44/c4/d244c4f45335c9cda4c423520254d5a3.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/15/a7/5e/15a75e64237c0e7d2e1c58b49be3b2fe.gif

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