Stranger Things: Final Week Animation Updates and General Project Polish

 

    Week 5 of this project ended up being thanksgiving break, so the blog posts go straight to the final week of updates, starting with our Interactive Character animation.

    The final model came in; since the model's dimensions had shifted some, the rig was adjusted to compensate, meaning the animation clips were bent slightly out of proportion in the original maya file shown above.

    Luckily, this was easily remedied using Unreal's IK retargeting system, most of which was done by our tech artist Cal. With a couple of tweaks on the IK solvers and joint offsets in the new animation files, the new model was able to run on the original animation clips and the longer extended fingers no longer clip into the legs.

Updated Animation Blueprint with new Preview Mesh

Pls Mute This Audio I didn't realize it was recording me

IK Retargeting Solver with source and target meshes

    With the animation officially complete and working in engine, I was free to make some polishing edits and assist the others with their final touch- ups, which included some texture/material troubleshooting, perforce being picky with source files, and final lighting/shadow adjustments. Mostly, I was responsible for timing the background music of the level and adding sound effects to the demogorgon when specific animations are triggered.

Simulation of VR Environment in Engine

Pls Also Mute This Audio I didn't realize it was recording me

    Overall, I think we really excelled as a team this week and our project turned out incredible. Despite all the high learning curves and setbacks this was a very rewarding experience, and I can't wait to show it off to everyone tomorrow.

    Shoutout to the rest of my excellent team for all your hard work!

        3D Eleven Hands and Demogorgon Models + Textures: Tristan Spear

        3D Environmental Assets + Textures, Lighting, Nav Mesh Assistance: Haley Kroppman

        Blueprint Implementation, Lighting, Perforce Directory Operations, Environmental VFX: Haoyu Wu

        Blueprint Implementation, Rigging + Skinning, Quality Assurance, Bug Testing: Cal Wohnoutka

Perforce Documentation

Stranger Things Week 04: Interactive Character Animation

 

    In week 4 of the VR Project, the Demogorgon, our interactive character, was ready for its first pass of animation. The Demogorgon is currently animated to idle when the player is not nearby, aware when the character approaches, attack when the player gets too close, and hurt when the player throws objects and hits the Demogorgon's inner trigger box.

    The animation was then taken into a new ABP for the demogorgon and set up into a state machine that moves between the states of awareness.

Perforce Documentation

Stranger Things VR Project: Week 03 Hand Animation Update

    For week 3 of the VR Project, the skeleton and mesh of the hand changed significantly enough that the animation had to be redone in maya. Using the same animation layer process as last week, the animation was easy to update in a few hours (4). 

    The animations were then brought in to replace the old clips, and in the Class Settings of the ABP, changed the ABP's skeleton to the Final Skeleton update. Additionally, the Grab animation for non-snap objects was replaced in favor of the Psychic Idle animation, where now Eleven can use her psychic power to levitate objects a few inches away from her hand. Next week, the hands will be able to interact with the character: Eleven will use her power to harm the demogorgon proxy. 

Perforce Documentation

 

Stranger Things VR Project Week 02: Updated Hand Animation

    For the second week of the VR Project, I polished the hand animation with a streamlined animating process. Using animation layers, I keyed the poses required and used an animation layer to overlay an idle animation on the poses, which cut down the time spent on key-framing animation from an hour to 30 minutes max while leaving space for iterations and additional poses.

    I then brought the animations into the engine and replaced the old animation clips with the updated animation clips. For the grabbing poses specifically, I created a custom animation state machine that would blend specific grabbing poses for our three props: coke can, d20 dice, and waffle. Now when the snap object blueprint is triggered by the hands, the animation state machine can play the correct animation grab based on the object snapping into place.

Perforce Documentation