Death to Dorothy
Visual Documentation of Work
Witch Rig Update
Updated Skinning
- Less clipping of the feet and ankles
- Less clipping in the armpits, looks better when holding the axe
Added Axe Joint
Animation Reel
Updated Blend Space with Updated Animations
Finished Animation State Machine for the Witch
Written Paragraph
What I Did
For the 'A' Stage of the Interactive Experience for the Death to Dorothy project, I focused most of my time on animation for the lion and the witch. I also made a few changes to the witch rig and updated the locomotion blend space and the state machine for the witch once all of the animations were done. First, I worked on the animations for the lion. Since we got a completely new rig for the lion again last stage, I had to recreate all the existing animations for the lion from scratch. Due to time constraints, I wasn't able to recreate the scratch/claw attack for the lion for the last submission so it was the first animation I worked on and finished for this round. I also created a completely new bite attack animation for the lion to fit with the bite VFX Raghavendra created for the lion. Once those two animations were done, I went back to the idle and walk cycles for the lion and improved them.
Next, I went back to the witch rig and worked on the skinning of the feet/ankles and the armpits since they were causing issues in engine. The arms still clip and stretch weirdly in the attack animation for the witch so I didn't fix the skinning completely, but the feet look much better and aren't causing any really weird movement in the witch blend space any longer. The armpits were clipping a lot in any pose the witch is holding the axe, so I did make that part of both arms look better in those poses. After that, I added a joint for the axe, parented it to the joint of the right hand, and then reskinned the axe to be attached to that new joint since the lack of joint on the axe was causing an issue where the axe would be moved from the left hand when the animation was exported from Maya and imported into Unreal. The new joint fixed that issue completely.
Then, I went back through all the witch animations and worked on improving them. The body of the witch was pretty low to the ground in some animations and that was also causing issues with the feet and knees so I raised the body and tried to counter-animate the popping knees with raising the heels on the IK feet. Raising the body helped the feet and legs not clip so badly. The feet positions were a bit jerky in the run and walk cycles as well so I worked on smoothing them out to look more natural. I also has issues in multiple animations were the secondary movement of the axe looked pretty jerky as well so I did my best to make that movement look more natural as well.
Once I was done with all these animations and fixes, I imported a new version of the witch skeleton and skeletal mesh and all these animations into Unreal. I updated the witch blend space with the new and improved idle, alert, walk, and run animations. The blend between idle to alert to walk is not very smooth and it makes some awkward movement so I was trying to work around it by making the idle cycle and the alert animation (which is essentially just a transition animation between idle and any animation where the witch is holding the axe in two hands) their own states but the state machine wouldn't work without a blend space being the first state from entry. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but I ended up returning to my blend space that went from idle to alert to walk to run instead.
After updating the blend space, I updated the state machine will all the new animations. I was having an issue where the state machine got stuck on one state and wouldn't progress through the attacking loop cycle but doing it over a couple times was able to fix it. I also added a jumping state and now the witch is able to jump from the locomotion state and the attacking loop state. The jump cuts the attacking animation off. The witch is successfully able to cycle through idle to alert to walk to run to attacking or jumping and back to locomotion.
Finally, I made a new game mode with the witch as the pawn so that the witch is now the character the player plays as in our interactive experience.
Perforce Directory
