Monday, September 29, 2025
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.
Friday, September 26, 2025
Use of Perspective
Death to Dorothy
Dorothy's Basket 3D/2D Concept Illustration
Pureref Board
Dorothy's Basket Maya Render (One-point, Two-point, and Three-point Perspective)
Creating an Illustration using the 3D Render Passes Technique
Perforce
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Module 2 Week 05 (Simple Crate and Barrel)
Game Asset Creation 101
Proxy (Block Out Mesh) and Game Resolution Model Creation
Process
GAC 01 - Establishing Scale Relationship
Putting Image Plane into Maya
Image Plane Image
GAC 02 - Creating a Proxy Object Pipeline
GAC 03 - Modeling in Maya Part 1
GAC 04 - Modeling in Maya Part 2
GAC 05 - Exporting from Maya
Reference
Beauty Shot
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Tech Art Homework #5
Basic Rigging
Basic Skeleton
To build a skeleton, I used the Create Joints tool in Maya and started with a root joint and then laid down a pelvis joint; three spine joints; a neck joint; a head joint; left upper arm, lower arm, hand, and fingers joints; and left thigh, calf, foot, and ball joints. Then I used the Mirror Joints operation to mirror my left arm and legs joints to get my right arm and leg joints. I made sure they were in the proper hierarchy before moving on to skinning.
Basic Skinning
To skin the joints to the meshes, I selected all the meshes in the Demon geometry group and then selected all the joints in my joint hierarchy and performed the Bind Skin operation. Maya did okay distributing skin weights to some areas of the model, but the legs needed a lot of work because there was a lot of influence on vertices from the root joint. The torso and pelvis also needed a lot of manual painting because the meshes of the upper body and pants didn't deform correctly when I rotated and moved the joints to test the skinning. Below is an image of a pose I put the model into using the joints as a test of the skinning when I finished painting skin weights for it. I put all the rotation values of all the joints back to 0 afterwards.
Simple FK Rig
I started the FK rigging process by creating templates for a circle control, a box control, and a box control with offset. Once I had those templates, I created a unique control the root control by box modeling a simple silhouette of a demon head and then using the EP Curve Tool to trace the shape I made. As a result, the root control for my rig is in the shape of a demon head silhouette. I also created curves from text saying "Demon" and used the MEL script "parent -r -s" to combine the Nurbs curve shapes with the demon head curve.
For the rest of the controls, I used my templates and modified them to fit the body better. I used my box control template to make the pelvis control. I used the circle control template to make both spine controls, both clavicle controls, and the neck control. I used my box control with offset to create all the controls on the legs and arms. To get the controls in the correct positions, I put each control in its own group and then used a parent constraint to constrain the group and the joint, deleting the constraint once I was done. Once each control was in the right position and oriented the correct way, I used a parent constraint to constrain the joint and the control so that the control would move the joint. As I did this for all the controls, I made sure to make the control groups the child of the correct previous control in the hierarchy so that the forward kinematics would work, the previous control in the hierarchy controlling the controls that come after it in the hierarchy.
File Directory in Perforce
Friday, September 19, 2025
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Modular Environmental Creation Part 3
Stage 03 Sculpting Phase
Process
Using Reference When Sculpting
Rendering Shots in ZBrush
Importing from ZBrush Into Unreal (Nanite)
Adding Complexity to our Sequencer Shots
Movie Render Queue Set Up
Beauty Shots
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