VR Final Week

For this final pass, the animations changed a lot from their proxy states.

The first rig was only FK, so there were no hip/leg movements and no weight shifting. With the new IK rig, I was able to add those subtle movements to the previous animation states. Also, because of the new rig, I was able to animate transitions between these states.

However, each time the rig evolved, changes needed to be made to the animations to make sure they looked good.

Due to some technical issues, our team changed the Nazgul's clothing. Instead of a cloth simulation, the cloak was modeled directly onto the character. With the clothes added, I needed to go in and adjust the animations to make sure that the cloak was not clipping through the model. There were plenty of challenges with this and it required a lot of successful rig breaking to make it look nice and also look natural.

Interactive Character Proxy

For this round, the goal was to get in four different animations: idle, awareness, and two interactive reaction states. Our character is one of the Nazgul, so the idle animation is based off of how the Nazgul hold their sword straight up before attacking. 

During playtests, we saw that our players really wanted to be able to pick up the swords and attack the Nazgul, so the two interactive animations are based off of that. There is a block reaction, where the Nazgul will hold up his sword in front of him, and a stabbed animation, which plays when the player hits the right trigger to harm the Nazgul.

Next week, the plan is to add an ik/fk switching to the rig so the legs can be animated in a realistic way.  I will also be adding transition animations between the states, such as swinging the sword and pulling the sword back.

I also added a couple fixes to the hand animations from last week. The grasp and index curl didn't quite fit around the sword correctly, so I adjusted those in Maya.

VR Week 03 - Final Hand Pass

This week, I finalized the hand animations. Fortunately, the animations from last week were pretty clean. I made a couple timing adjustments to vary the fingers. I also adjusted some of the weight painting issues that I was noticing in our mesh. Once the new animations were finalized, they were uploaded to perforce. 

My second focus this week was to do one more special animation. Our team wanted to find a way to do a one-handed animation for putting on the ring. I decided to do a "ring flair" animation. When the player picks up the ring, they can press a button on the controller to put it on. When the button is pressed, the hand will curl into a fist around the ring and put it on in a very stylish one-handed way. This was to streamline the process of getting the ring on and preventing potential bugs from a two-handed animation.

VR Week 02 - Hand Clean Pass

 

This week, my goal was to clean up the hand animations and add a new one as well.

The feedback I received on the previous iteration was that the hands moved too evenly and needed some more irregularity. I went back in and did two things: one, change the the finger timing so that the fingers all raised and lowered at slightly different frames, and two, added a second cycle to the idle. Each idle now has two different up and down cycles within it, to give more variation and be more realistic. 

The previous week, the hand mesh had some issues and couldn't be animated in certain positions. Now that the bug was fixed, I was able to go in and adjust some of the finger positioning.

I also added a new character-specific animation, finger-spreading. In our game, we want the player to be able to put the ring on their hand, so we needed an animation that had the fingers spread open a little wider to make room for the ring.