In the next week, we will be seriously delving into demoing
technical considerations for the art and style of this project, such as
particle effects, animation features, and environment modularity.
In terms of Shahzaad’s fire pieces, we decided against
creating them purely through particle effects, and continued towards Nielson’s
overall sculpted aesthetic by having the fire be modeled in mesh. To simulate the look of living fire, we explored
layering panning and rotating emissive textures in UE4’s material editor to
give a stylized appearance of fire:
We hope to refine on this stylization, and will also work on some sort of physics-based joint system that will give the mesh fire pieces more natural movement and life.
For animation, we’ve been working on refining a specialized
auto-rigger that could be used to not only quickly animate Shahzaad and his
wispy ghost tail, but perhaps other proxy spirits that may populate the Walled
City:
The auto-rigger will have IK/FK switching capability, as
well as specialized controls such as IK splines and driven keys to easily
animate motions of the wispy tail, such as the tail curling or undulating.
As for facial animation, we are currently exploring the
option of using blendshape-based animation.
As blendshape states in UE4 are accessible as attributes, we find that
this would best suit the Character Interaction portion of our game. When the player meets Chao and speaks to him,
the screen becomes fixed and Chao will physically react/change when the eye
passes over certain collision boxes over points of interest. Linking such eye-triggered events with a
subtle change in blendshape state as he speaks would be preferable to having
extensive management of joint-based animation to blend different mood states
with speaking states and so forth.
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