Theo Hübner Sallis

This project was a development of an assignment I did at TGA. The task was to use an animal reference and try to apply its unique body language to Arc the dragon rig by Josh Sobel. I ended up using a rat as my reference for how it would move on land and a bat as a fitting complement to how it would move while airborne.

This piece from the very beginning was a collaborative process with character artist, Milla Jaakkola Landin, who wanted to adapt a concept by Léna Clapaud.We chose to collaborate in order to elevate each others work. Because I had worked with Milla previously I knew I would get a high quality 3D character with animation friendly topology. In return, Milla would receive support to ensure the model is animation-ready, along with a set of functional poses and animations.

Tim Lee and myself served as the mocap actors for this project. It was a unique challenge having two grown men trying to realistically portray a little girl no older than 12.I wrote a manual with a set of pointers in how to act it out and we had one of us directing whoever was acting to make sure the body language was right.

I ended up having to stitch together 5 different takes of mocap data to get the exact sequence of events that I wanted. I used the story mode tool with ghosting to get the different clips put together into roughly the same position and then began cleaning the data

To give speed up the process of animating her long hood I rigged it in motion builder with physics solvers and baked down the keys to the main skeleton. On the right you can see the clip with no physics on the hood and below you can see the same clip with physics active on the hood.

This allowed me to have a baseline of realistic movement on the hood that I could then tweak using animation layers. In the final scene I added layers to get the windy effect I was going for which overrode much of the physics but I still think having the physics there added a sense of realism to its movement

After finishing up in maya I exported it over to unreal engine 5 for the final render.To elevate the scene I worked with a level designer and technical artist who made the set and blizzard VFX respectively

After getting most of the body mechanics right in motion builder I moved the project into maya and retargeted the animation to the rig I had built.
This was so that I could animate the skirts, face, and fingers, as well as make adjustments to her hood.

Given that we began developing this from the default unreal 5 third person blueprint there was a great deal of work that needed to go in to making the movement feel right.We upped the velocity to get a faster more action packed feel and increased the inertia to me more in line with skating. I made a blendspace with slow and fast skating as well as leaning into turns.

I eventually developed the rail system further by using transform by bone nodes to give the spine an additive lean when responding to turns in the rails.

The railgrind animations went through several iterative stages. Initially it was only a 1D blendspace which used the slope of the rail to determine the animation. I eventually changed it to account for inversion as well for when the rail takes you upside down. In it's current state the player crouches down and grabs on to the rail when upside down, straightens out when flat, and leans backwards/forwards depending on slope

I dedicated significant time to refining the falling animations. After developing a placeholder, I realized a Blend Space was necessary to handle the various entry points into the falling state. Through lots of testing, I tweaked the transitions to feel flowy across regular jumps, jumps in motion, ramp launches, and natural falls.

When looking at reference footage for my animations I saw that one of the things skaters love doing is jumping off of ramps. To get the ramps right I built a system where I used a sphere trace to detect the impact normals of the surface in front of me. If the values were within a certain range the ramp takes the forward momentum of the player, adds a booster value to it, and launches them up into the air.

The wall ride animations ended up being one of the easiest parts for me as Ahab built the whole underlying system for which I simply had to make animations that felt flowy. I knew I wanted a trick of some sort somewhere in the game so I ended up making the wall jump be a side flip off the wall. Thank you Trinity from The Matrix for showing me how it's done.