Final Delivery

 For the final delivery, I connected Zinta's facial blend shapes to a set of controllers to control the expressions, the eyelids, eyebrows, jaw, and smirk. I also added lamp controls that blends between an inhale and exhale blend shapes and added a control to allow the shaking of the lamp and the lid. Continued refinement of Zinta's animation while incorporating facial and lamp animations. Below is the result of two months of collaboration with Charles Price and Monica De Puy.

Sprint #5 Delivery

 For Sprint #5, I polished Zinta's animation along with the timing of the camera to make the overall animation more cohesive based on feedback. The camera pulled back fast and added a pushup for when the legs pop out on the climax. The ending pose is more refined and had Zinta take a step forward as she's swinging her sword. All these changes were pushed to engine where the next sprint will have blend shapes for facial expressions and to relax some of her poses. Below is the updated animation.

Sprint #4 Delivery

 For Sprint #4, I worked on polishing Zinta's animation, adding more key poses and in-betweens to construct a clear picture of the final iteration. I added a twirl to the beginning of the animation, overlap in the arms, and will be adding facial expressions and a more polished overall animation in the next sprint. I pushed the animation from Maya to engine and scaling works one to one. Listed below are the comparisons.

Sprint #3 Delivery

 For Sprint #3, I created IK/FK Switch to allow freedom of choice for animation purposes and an ROM of the more polished skin weighting of Zinta with a slight change where I added a joint controller to allow baked scaling for the purpose of baking down the animation to the skeleton and importing into Unreal Engine and remapped existing scale to the new root controller bone. Next pass will be further polish on the main body animation.

Here are the results inside Unreal Engine.

Sprint #2 Delivery

For Sprint #2, I developed a skeleton for Zinta along with a control rig for keyframe animation. Currently it moves with IK for the legs and FK for the arms. For the next pass, I will include an IK/FK switch for freedom of choice and will allow me to swap between them when she's floating in the sky to when she lands. Additional functionality to the hair will be made by next sprint.

Here is an ROM of the current iteration of the rig:

Sprint #1 Delivery

For Sprint #1, I developed a test animation for the camera in Maya and imported it into Unreal Engine so that it is one-to-one with the scene which I will be animating in.  Shown below are side by side comparisons of the camera in Maya to Unreal Engine.

Additionally, I created a proxy skeleton for the Genie in preparation for the second pass of the character with the new leg position. There are test blend shapes for the legs and tail that are scaled down very small to mimic visibility, allowing me to focus on animation through Maya entirely and bake out the blend shapes in the final pass of the animation.

0 = On | 1 = Off

Figure Drawing Portfolio

Lighting Workshop Module #4

For this week's lighting assignment I did challenge #1. I used the doorway as the main focal point of the scene, while keeping 80% of the scene in the shadows.

I used the "Fantasy Cave Environment Set" from the Unreal Marketplace and deleted the existing lighting, relighting the scene from scratch. All the assets in this set has been converted to nanite.

In this scene I added a gap in the top of the cliffs to allow god rays to flow through, used a post process volume to control the exposure, added an exponential height fog for volumetric god rays.

Lighting Workshop Module #3

 For this week, I used a three-point lighting setup on a dragon model to demonstrate a grainy grunge map, playing around with the roughness and metallic values to help bring out the reflective areas of the texture. After making the material, I made a material instance to allow real-time value changes.

 Here is the Master Material:

Material Instance:

Lighting Workshop Module #2

 

I used a SkySphere with an HDRI to light this scene including depth of field post processing. Added four spheres with black, white, mid grey, and chrome materials to check lighting values.

Lighting Workshop Module #1

My first render of the provided Panther model using a key light (Red), rim light (Blue), and fill light (Green).

Week 15 VR Interactive Characters (Final Pass)

 This week I created some final pass animations for Bowser Jr. Two interactables, one awareness, and as for the idle, the team decided that the idle from the clean pass was good for the final pass. I developed a Pet animation for when Bowser Jr. is petted on the head. A Poke animation will play when Bowser Jr. is poked by the player. A surprised animation plays when in proximity of Bowser Jr. Catch and clapping will be used in conjunction with proximity of the character. Additionally, I updated Bowser Jr.'s model using the existing skeleton and used that for these animations. These animations and rigs along with their source files are uploaded onto Perforce.

Final Rig:

Perforce:

Week 13 VR Interactive Characters (Clean Pass)

This week I polished up Bowser Jr.'s rig adding hand and toe bones along with additional bones for the hair and ribbon. I created controllers for these features and moved on to create clean pass animations. I made a clean pass on the idle animation, the "clap" awareness animation, and the two interactive animations which are the carry and catch animations. These animations along with the source files for each of them with the default rig are uploaded to Perforce. For next week, I plan on polishing these animations more and make more adjustments to the skin weights.

Clean Skeleton:

 Perforce:

Week 12 VR Interactive Characters (Proxy Pass)

This week I developed a proxy skeleton and proxy animations for Bowser Jr. I created an idle animation, an awareness "clap" animation, and two interactable animations which are the carry and catch animations. Bowser Jr. will raise its arms out asking the player to carry it. The catch animation while interacting with Bob-omb in hand will put Bowser Jr. in a ready to catch pose, like to play catch with Bob-omb. The skeleton itself will be adjusted during the clean pass to add finger and toe bones along with bones for the hair and the ribbon part of the clothing and animations will be polished to compensate that.

Proxy Skeleton:

Perforce:

Week 11 VR Hands And Props (Final Pass)

 This week I made 7 different facial expressions using blend shapes for Bob-omb and threw them into a single prop animation clip to be imported into Unreal Engine 4. There was a extra pinky joint chain in the left hand skeleton. I deleted that extra chain and re-imported that hand. The team decided that the animation clips used for the clean pass is good to use for the final pass. Additionally, I assisted Lisa with finding references for morph target implementation and I was tasked with creating a material and a material instance for the walls in the VR scene.

Perforce:

Week 10 VR Hands And Props (Clean Pass)

This week I rigged the first pass for Bob-omb along with making a walk cycle and a grab animation using Bowser's hands. Blend shapes for the eyes were developed to give expressions to the Bob-omb. These will be finalized in the final pass. I also made a clean pass on the fist, thumb down, and point animations. I then submitted them to Perforce along with their Maya source files.

Week 9 VR Hands and Props (Proxy Pass)

This week I developed an FK rig for each hand. Each of the hands are at origin, below is displayed side by side for visual presentation. Afterwards, I made 10 animations (5 for each hand), going through the motions that Unreal Engine 4 uses for VR. Me and Lisa discovered export issues from Maya that showed up in Unreal and I swiftly moved to resolve them and re-exported. 

Perforce: