Tech Art Homework #6

 

Game Animation

 

Demon ROM

First, I went into Maya and made a simple animation showing 4 different poses to display the range of motion of my Demon rig from last assignment. Once I finished, I exported the skeleton and mesh and imported them into Unreal as a skeletal mesh. Then I baked the animation to the skeleton and re-exported the skeleton and mesh with animation and imported them into Unreal with animation, making sure to make the skeleton the one from the Demon skeletal mesh.

 

Retargeting ROM and Mixamo Animation

Then I downloaded a character model and animation from Mixamo and imported them into my project. Once they were in my content browser, I set up an IK rig for both the Demon and my downloaded character, Michelle. After that, I created IK Retargeters to put my ROM on Michelle and the Hip Hop Dance animation I downloaded on the Demon. Then I exported those animations with the prefix retargetter_. I put the skeletal mesh of Michelle and the Demon in the scene and then changed the setting to get animation from an animation asset and chose the animations I exported. After that, the retargetted animation started to play when I pressed play in the viewport.

 

 

Creative Animation in Maya

 To create the creative animation, I found a reference video of a break dancer doing a head spin and then went back into Maya. I recreated the basic poses of the head spin in a loop-able animation using my Demon rig. Once I was done, I exported the animation and imported into Unreal using the same process of before. 

All Instances of Animation

 I placed an instance of the Demon doing the head spin after importing it into Unreal and then created a new retargeter to retarget the head spin animation to Michelle. I followed the same process to export the animations to make it play in the viewport. Then I set up a little scene for the presentation of my project and lined up all my animation instances for easy viewing.

 

 

File Directory in Perforce