Stranger Things VR Project: Proxy Hand Animation

 

Proxy Hand Animation For Stranger Things VR Project

    Responsible for the 6 proxy animations for the player's VR hands : pointing, relaxed, grab, using psychic power, thumb down, and index curl. Took the animation from maya into Unreal 5.2 and worked with our team's tech artist to connect the animation to the input. Mirrored the key animation from Right hand to Left hand manually with the intent to mirror procedurally in the animation blueprint at a later point. The player can now interact with a D20 and use psychic power to hurt the Demogorgon in a similar fashion to Eleven from Stranger Things.

character hand model by Tristan Spear

character hand rig by Cal Wohnoutka

blueprint implementation by Haoyu Wu

VR environment by Haley Kroppman

saved everything separately for easy iteration later during the process

Star Wars Crate Project Part 3: Importing Maps to UE5

 

Texture Maps painted in Substance Painter, Images rendered in Unreal Engine 5

Reference Images from the animated series Star Wars Rebels

Common Art 6: Composition

Compositional Piece inspired by the concept art of Syd Mead

Syd Mead was an inspirational concept artist and futurist responsible for the images of what cyberpunk looks like today; he worked on the visuals for several futuristic movies, including Bladerunner, Alien, and Tron. His work was meant to inspire a hedonistic and elegant approach to futurism as opposed to the gritty dystopian fantasy of futuristic apocalypses.

L shape composition lines overlayed on top of design

Reference Images of Syd Mead's compositions and art style

More information about Syd Mead

 

Star Wars Crate Project Part 2: High Poly Mesh and Substance Baking

High Poly Sculpt of Crate in ZBrush

Low Poly Re-mesh from ZBrush

First Pass at Texturing in Substance Painter, with high poly mesh baked onto low poly mesh and a base procedural grunge metal applied. Rendered in Substance Painter.

Crate Texture References:

 

Common Art 5: Perspective Excersise

 The theme of this perspective exercise was "transport", so to keep with the other progressions of the common art exercises I designed a custom Mario Kart Wii Mach Bike for Samus so she can race with the other Nintendo characters.

I used a proxy 3D model to set up an accurate two point perspective in Maya with grids, and set up a camera with the focal length i wanted for both my composition and my perspective reference.

The Mach Bike was modeled after the 1972 Harley Davidson XRTT Road Racer, originally created to keep up with British racing motorcycles.

References

3D Art Week 05: Simple Crate and Barrel Proxy, Low Res, and Hih

Crate inspired by Imperial Crates on Star Wars: the Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, and Bad Batch animated series

Maya Viewport: UVs and wireframe

Unreal engine: In-engine viewport with primitive lighting build

Reference Images, from the Star Wars animated series

Common Art 4: Lighting Set-Up

 

Original Samus Silhouette by Anupama Narayan

Lighting and Color come from the value sheet from part 3 of this project.