Facial Rig

The facial rig was a three part assignment for Tech Art 2. Technically we made FK rigs back in Tech Art 1. However, that felt like a life time ago and I had no clue what I was doing. So I consider this to be my first actual rig. We utilized Judd Simantov's rigging tutorials. The model was provided by Cody Noll.

When I first started this assignment I tried doing it in Houdini. I wont call that my worst idea at FIEA but It wasn't a great idea. I would've preferred finishing the rig in Houdini but my lack of experience and the sparsity of tutorials made it difficult to finish. Instead I finished the rig in Maya.

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If I had to redo it I would do a two things differently. The most important thing is I would've had one of our talented animators take it for a spin. There feedback would've been invaluable when making the controls and correcting weights. Otherwise I would've tried more than just set driven keys.

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Animation Based Gameplay

Throughout FIEA the art track has industry reviews that represent the midterm and final for each semester. This was an animation based gameplay sample I made for the first industry review.

The player character is doing a few things in this sample. The primary thing is that red debug line that shoots from the characters finger tip. That line is a ray trace also known as a line trace. It allows the player character to talk to anything that line intersects with. In the above example it's the barrels.

The barrels are listening and will react when that ray trace hits them. In the above sample they smoke for a bit to confirm being hit then explode. Like the barrels the player character is also listening from the animation thanks to anim notifies. Basically at a special frame of the animation a call is sent to the player character telling it to shoot.