Star Wars Project Episode VI: Return of Your Mom

Final Animatic: 

Team Progress:

    With all assets completely done modeling, the team moved onto Polish for the last 2 weeks of the project. During this final sprint, all textures were fully completed, more decals for graffiti and blaster scorch marks were made for set dressing, lighting received a 3rd and 4th pass, and animation was finalized for real this time.

    However, Motion Builder had Different Plans.

    After many many hours of wailing and gnashing of teeth (and about 20 retries on looping the walk cycle of the troopers only to end in bitter defeat), the motion capture data was finally cleaned, skating was minimized, the blaster was constrained to the hand and the secondary hand was constrained to the blaster.

    In Unreal, the Trooper and the DC-15a Blaster Prop was socketed together in a Blueprint and placed in the level. And then put through another round of additive animation.

    Finally, the Sequence was reviewed over and over until my eyes bled and I still somehow missed that the walker stopped in frame and froze for the last half of the animatic. The walker ultimately got a final (Final polish v02 for real this one) pass and everything rendered out nice and neat (after...weeks of not rendering out nice OR neat. At all).

    The animatic ultimately ended up being 17 seconds of cinematic cutscene, 1 march cycle offset on 7 different troopers, an Idle Trooper animation, and the Main Trooper Highlight animation, completed in motion builder, plus the additional animation of the Walker, all done natively in Unreal with a custom made control rig.

Animation Highlights from this Project

Huge Shoutout again to my amazing teammates: 

Jessica Blask ; 3D Character Artist- AT ST Walker

Eric Wiley ; 3D Character Artist - Tank Trooper

Justin Diaz ; 3D Environment Artist

Haley Kroppman ; 3D Prop Artist - DC-15a Rifle Blaster

Kirsten Futch ; 3D Hard Surface Prop Artist

and a huge shoutout to my SFX Designer, Yegues Shettini

Star Wars Project Episode V: The Cohort Strikes Back

 Team Progress:

    Work work work- we turned up the juice these two weeks to power through our production phase and get all our assets as finalized as we could.

    From a production standpoint, we were able to hit most of our goals during this fifth sprint, which leaves the team able to use our last two weeks of work to polish our assets to the highest quality we can! We successfully completed the following:

• All models finalized
• (Almost) All textures finalized
• Dirt/Rubble Effects and set dressing
• Animation pass 2/2
• Lighting pass 2/3

    We also had a few happy surprises happen during the sprint regarding the characters:

    A collaborative effort between the animation department and the character modeling department (read: me and Eric) led to a Storm Trooper Skeletal Mesh Update. Together, we worked to split the topology of the Trooper between the flexible leather uniform and the hard plastic-like armor, and with the additional polish time, Eric updated the Trooper's topology to be more skinning and animation friendly. This allowed for significant polish to the trooper rig, including the addition of secondary animation on the shoulder pads and belt pouches to reduce clipping and breathe more life into the trooper's motion capture performance.

    Additionally, Jedha now has a new robot friend to keep our Gonk Droid company- our Prop Artist Kirsten was able to create a new BB-8 model along with finishing all of her planned set dressing props.

    Our environment is coming together nicely with a beautiful update to the rubble set dressing and procedural sand/stone textures along the buildings and a second pass at scene lighting.

    And finally, animation is being polished to perform as naturally as possible. Another cool surprise the additional time allowed for was a re-animation of our second camera.

    We went back to the motion capture studio and connected our Star Wars scene to our Vicon Shogun Live set up on stage and used Live Linking to record live animation data for our camera directly into our sequence, reacting as if our point-of-view character was ducking away from the searching stormtrooper.

Animatic Version 5: Unreal Sequence

Still to Come:

• Placing the blasters in the trooper's hands correctly
• Final Lighting Pass, including volumetric fog
• Final Sound, courtesy of Yegues Schettini

Stay tuned for Episode VI...

Star Wars Project Episode IV: A New Heart Attack

 Team Progress:

    Significant work was made to push all the assets into game ready mid or high poly assets, with everything in the scene currently textured with at least a proxy version of a texture pass.

    The characters, the ATST walker and the Stormtrooper, had their rigs updated and re-skinned to account for their new geometry pass- in the walker's case, their final geometry is officially in engine.

    Animation wise, the team reviewed the progress and decided it would be beneficial to use motion capture data to animate the Stormtroopers- this keeps the movement of the troopers realistic AND allows us to possibly extend our animatic time past the original goal of 10 seconds of animation.

    Currently, the first pass of a walk cycle is exhibited on the group of four troopers, with a second pass planned for Sprint 5 that includes variations in timing and walk cycles, and a highlighted animation for when the individual trooper breaks off to investigate the hidden camera.

Animatic Version 4.0: Value and Color Pass

Trooper Walk Cycle in Engine

Setting Updates: Value and Color Texture Pass

Here is the moment we knew we had to re-visit the skinning on the trooper oops hehe

The Walker has grown Far Too Powerful She now works in both maya and Unreal