Sprint #6 Delivery

 This sprint, I added finishing weighting touches onto the Angel, added the completed textures to the rig files, added the stained glass panels to the Angel rig, fixed an issue with the cherry blossom fire starting in the air, and added blendshapes to the human tree to make it have some facial expressions. 

Overall, my contributions to the Common Art Project included: 

The Demon Rig (FK/IK Switching)

The Angel Rig (Full IK) 

Cherry Blossoms/Fire VFX 

Blendshapes on the human trees. 

Mistakes that were made: I probably would have made Nassir do a ROM with just the skeleton on the Demon before going as complicated as I did. 

Words of advice: Don't underestimate how many times an animator will ask you to change things. I spent at least 50 hours on the Demon and I would estimate 40 for the Angel. This included skeletal orientation changes, controls, and various weighting adjustments. 

Takeaways: Even though it was hard work, I genuinely enjoyed what I did and I have some really good portfolio pieces to show now! 

Angel rig with stained glass in Engine 

Angel rig with added glass and stained glass textures 

Added textures to the Demon Rig Files 

Fixed a collision issue with the cherry blossom VFX, and also added some variation in play rate to make the fire flicker less uniform. 

Demo of tree people blendshapes in Maya 

Blendshapes working in-engine 

 

Sprint #5 Delivery

This week, I integrated the retopologized body into the Angel rig, fixed some orientations on the controls, and cleaned up the weight paints. I also did some minor edits to the cherry blossom VFX, changing the direction that the petals blow in and creating a duplicate of the emitter without the fire to add more pedals to our scene. Additionally, I removed the cloth wrap from the Angel body, as it was hindering performance and causing lag.  I have attached my Perforce images below.  

Quick video showing the new weight paints/body 

Sprint #4 Delivery

 This sprint, I finished the Angel Rig. It is fully FK to ensure that our animator can start working immediately. I might try to add some refined features now that both the rigs are in a complete state, such as an IK spine or spline spine. 

My perforce submissions, as you can see I had many incremental saves of the rig. The final one is AzrealRig_Complete.mb. 

Quick ROM showing the new rig in use. 

Sprint #3 Delivery

 This sprint, I spent a lot of time fixing issues with the demon rig (fixing IK/FK switch issues, bone orientations, adding bones for procedural physics, and adding some muscle deformation bones) as well as setting up the skeleton for the Angel and doing some rough weight painting for Nassir to do a ROM before I make the rig. I brought the rigs into the Engine as well. I am currently trying to also add some simple chaos cloth physics to the Angel as well. 

Next sprint, I plan to add the clean pass demon model to the rig and clean up any weight painting and possibly add some blendshapes for the chest mouth. I also want to complete the Angel rig so that Nassir can start animating both the Angel and the Demon for our cinematic scene. 

My Perforce submissions 

ROM of the Angel skeleton I made, complements of Nassir Hazim 

Angel skeletal mesh, shown in Engine 

Angel skeleton, shown in Maya

Quick ROM showing the new controls/additions for the demon rig that I made (muscle controls for thigh, physics bones, fixing pole vectors) 

Demon rig, shown in Maya

Demon rig, shown in engine 

                

Sprint #2

 I did a lot of work during this sprint, including setting up a material for the burning leaf, and setting up a Niagara system to control the VFX. I also made a fire VFX to add to this as well. This included adding collision events to the particles to layer the effects. I also set up a fairly robust rig for the Demon character, complete with FK/IK switching for the limbs. 

Common Art Sprint #1 Delivery

 This week, I set up the Unreal 5.2 project for Angel's Versus Demons and also 3D-Modeled a proxy cherry blossom petal to use in my Niagara Emitter. I also set up a blowing leaf emitter with the cherry blossoms and used a tree from Sketchfab to show it in action. Next week I hope to add collision events so that the blossoms will catch fire when they hit the ground. 

Lighting Workshop Week 4

 

For this week, I attempted to recreate the fog, and unnerving lighting shown when fighting Leshens in the Witcher 3. I even added the creepy birds flapping over head. I used an HDR file for the lighting, in addition to some spot lights, point lights, and a directional light. I also added some exponential height fog to give it a misty look. The environment is the "Medieval Game Environment" from the Epic Games store. 

Lighting Workshop Week 3

 

Week 2 Lighting Assignment

 Here is my week 2 lighting assignment. I reused my barrel that I made last semester in 3D Art and put it into a forest scene using a few different HDR files to try and see the various results. I also used a post-process volume and turned on infinite bounds and turned off auto-exposure. I think the results are very interesting! 

Week 1 Lighting Assignment

 

Spirited Away VR: Interactive NoFace (Final Pass)

 This week, I FINALLY figured out how to get my prop affecting the state machine on my NoFace blueprint. I set it up so that if I pick up a specific token, NoFace opens his mouth. If I feed him a Riceball, he closes his mouth and rains bath tokens on me! I had a lot of fun with Niagara emitters to make him more like the Spirited Away movie. I also added an emitter that has gold raining out of his hands like in the Spirited Away movie. 

Here is a video showing the final product! I had a lot of fun bringing NoFace to life. 

This is the beginning of my NoFace blueprint, where I made an array variable that has all instances of the Bath Token and the Riceball blueprints in the scene. It uses this to set the variables for NoFace's aniamtions later on. 

This is a blueprint showing how I triggered the gold emitters that come out NoFace's hands. 

This part is kind of messy garbage but it WORKS. Basically this works by checking if my Variable for NoFace's mouth open is true or false. If False, it checks to see if a token is held and if it is true, it sets the NoFace mouth variable to true. If NoFace IS angry/mouth open, it checks all the instances of the Riceball prop and see's if it is overlapping with the trigger box I put in NoFace's mouth. If true, it sets NoFace mouth open to false and destroyts the prop. As a result, this triggers a Niagara emitter that rains Tokens on the player as a sign of NoFace's gratitude. 

I set the gold emitter to delete itself after playing once as I thought it might be annoying for it to play all the time.