Games Com 2018
In August of 2018, me and some peers went to Games Com in Cologne with the University, we all had a great time and we got to do some great things there. I got to play some games that weren't released yet, for example the new Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I also got to see many people talking about upcoming events as well as announcements. My favourite area had to be the Blizzard area, that area was always had lots of people and there was always something happening on that stage. Sadly I was only their for the weekend and I didn't get to see everything but I am happy with what I did see. I also got to see all of the fun merchandise which I managed to get my hands on some things.
Animation
Knight character rigging
For the Hex knight cinematic I created I had a lot of work to do with rigging the two characters as well as some environmental pieces. Creating the skeleton wasn't too hard as Maya is very good at making that part simple, the main trouble I had was adjusting the skin weights and making the model work with motion capture. Skin weights is where you label certain areas of the model to react to movements from certain joints, for example for the elbow joint on the skeleton I needed everything selected past that joint as that's what would move, the hardest part about that was making movements look natural as certain geometry with the character would hide from view or the paints wouldn't spread around the model smoothly, this was made even harder by the fact the armour on the character hid certain areas of the character.
While this was partly challenging but the hardest part was getting the rig to work with motion capture, I didn't have a large amount of time to work with this but this was certainly a challenge getting the few shots I got with it, the software I was using was good at capturing the movements of the person in the suit but having the model perfectly keeping to the skeleton seemed to have some trouble, fortunately I found a better solution when I managed to put the animation together, the minor problems that came out during recordings I would simply adjust back in Maya, these problems wouldn't range more than a joint rotating too much or moving slightly out of natural place.
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Overall, the two characters worked well with the skeleton as I was able to smoothly move my character where I needed to without distortions, it just took a bit of setting up and once I had that everything worked well. As well as the characters I also used a skeleton for the flag from the castle shot and the book when it gets opened by the pursuer characters, these gave me no trouble whatso ever.
Hex Knight
I've been worked on the project for a long time now, around eight months to be exact and I'm glad for it to be complete. This is a cinematic to be advertisement for a video game, similar to the trailers Blizzard Entertainment, Bethesda or Valve release to give some story elements to get audiences interested in the story of their games. This is a trailer for a game called Hex Knight, magic has left this fantasy world with few artefacts of that world behind, this cinematic explores when one of those artefacts gets discovered and brings the more powerful ones that have survived inot power again.
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This cinematic shows two characters, one which has a charge to protect these artefacts and make sure they don't get into the wrong hands and someone who has been given power by these artefacts and wishes for more.
This project was going to use Motion capture to get the animations of the characters but I wasn't able to get all of it due to the pandemic, instead I used Mixamo animations and adjusted them to fit the cinematic as well as my own animations for certain scenes that couldn't be found on Mixamo although I made adjustments to those animations and even made my own in certain instances, I only wish I had time to make it all my own animations as this was a university project but I'm still able to improve this project with my own work in the future. Here are some clips from the cinematic, the link below will take you to the full cinematic.
Hex Knight cinematic
Enemy animations
I was given the role of animating the enemies for a mobile game as well as other creating assets, these animations were my most time consuming task however. I made walking animations for all of these four characters as well as other directions and death animations as well this was rather fun as it lead me to be more creative with what these characters would do when making certain movements and actions.
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These enemies are considered nightmares that attack the player so I went for a very ethereal look for them which also shows in their death animations as they evaporate away into a cloud before going completely.
Screen Robot
For a personal project with some freinds of mine I created a robot character which moves around with the player. He provides info to the character and assistance in fights, this requires that he must keep up with the player wherever he goes, this includes walking and flying with the player, the only place he can't go is under water however.