Project Management Tool: Getting My Ideas

 For the beginning of my project management tool, I wanted to plan it out.  Planning out how a tool works and the design always helps me visualize how my tools are going to work and what my end goal is.  What I considered for my project management tool is, data structure, naming conventions, and the UI of my tool.  Using illustrator I created a simple data structure with the Facility folder on the top level and my project folder being a on a lower level of my project management tool.  To make it easy to understand I color coded my data structure.  

Project Management Tool: Data Structure

Creating a data structure has made me realize that there's a lot of thought that goes into making sure that everything is clean and organized.  There's also a lot of different departments that need to be thought of.  Aside from creating an organized data structure, I also created some naming conventions.  My tool needs to consider the way that assets move from the art depot to the game depot.  The art depot has a slightly different naming convention than the game depot because of the way Unreal Engine names it assets.

Project Management Tool: Naming Conventions

While this is a lot of naming conventions, there are still some naming conventions that need to be considered such as the animation reference files.  Naming conventions are an incredibly important part of the organization of a project as well as a make or break because some programs such as Maya will break if a naming convention is incorrect.  With programs such as Maya in mind, I go into the design of my interfaces.  For my interface design I chose a window with two tabs.  One tab that works on creating projects and one tab that works with creating assets.  Switching between the two tabs should be easy and simple and both interfaces should be clear to understand. When you first open the tool you should be on the Project Manager tab that will allow you to create new projects, show you existing projects, rename projects and delete projects.

Project Management Tool: Project Manager UI Design Idea 

While the project manager tab creates projects easily, the asset manager tab works specifically with creating specific types of files such as maya, ZBrush, houdini, photoshop, and illustrator.  This window also considers if the asset is an animation, model, or rig.  Showing the user current projects the user is able to rename an asset, delete an asset, and cancel.

Project Management Tool: Asset Manager UI Design Idea 

Cleaning and Characterizing MoCap Data in Motionbuilder

 

Gif of Clean and Characterized Motion Capture Data with Character Attached

Cleaning and characterizing motion cap data is simpler than I imagined especially since this is my first experience with Autodesk Motion Builder.  When opening motion builder for the first time, I first set up my settings so that to navigating the perspective view is exactly like Maya. 

Setting Up Settings for Interaction

I also learned about the hot keys ctrl + W which toggles between schematic view and producer perspective view.  The other hotkey I learned about was ctrl + A  which can show the model only, x-ray of the skeleton (rig), or no skeleton.  

Schematic View

Opening the motion capture data is as simple as navigating to your motion capture FBX and simply opening it.  For my project I created a dedicated folder to hold multiple folders to organize my files as I am cleaning two motion capture FBX's and using a character rig.

Navigating and Opening Motion Capture

I really didn't know what to expect when I opened the motion capture data, but it was messier than I thought as you find unmarked markers, camera systems, and markers on the skeleton.  

Not Cleaned and Characterized Motion Builder Scene

After opening the scene I learned about the timeline.  I found it really interesting to hear about how the unmarked markers appear in the motion capture data.  When the character walks in the scene the unmarked markers don't move with the animation like the markers on the skeleton.  They stay in place.

Timeline Gif

At this point I opened up my schematic view and began to clean the file.  I took out the camera system, marked markers, unmarked markers, and the stick markers that were in my scene.  I left the skeleton data, position data, and the actor data in the scene.

Original Schematic View

Cleaned Schematic View

With my schematic view cleaned, my perspective view changed to show just the skeleton.

Clean Perspective View

From here, I needed to clean my rotations on the skeleton.  To do this I grabbed the entire skeleton and in the properties I changed all the rotation values to 0.  This made the skeleton lay on it's back looking straight up.  

Rotations on Entire Skeleton at 0

I then grabbed the skeleton's hip joint and in the properties changed the rotation x value to 90.

Rotate Hip to 90

I once again grabbed the entire skeleton, not the position or the uppermost node, and changed my timeline to start at 0.  I then keyed the skeleton at 0. 

Keyed Skeleton at 0

At this point the skeleton is ready to be characterized! In the asset browser under resources you will find characters under templates.  Under characters drag character onto the hip joint of the skeleton and push characterize and then biped.  I got very lost the first time I did this so I'm writing it down so that it's easy to understand and remember.  

Characterized Skeleton

I then took a step further to make sure my scene was very organized.  I went to my navigation tab and under characters I renamed character to MoCap so that it is easy to know what my mocap data is.

Organized Mocap Data

My scene is now cleaned and characterized!

Gif of Cleaned and Characterized MoCap Walk

Since I did two mocap animations I followed the same steps above for my idle animation.  

Gif of Original Idle Animation MoCap Data

Gif of Cleaned and Characterized Idle Animation MoCap Data

To really bring these animations to life I grabbed a rig from the FIEA mocap rig library.  I personally don't know anything about Fire Emblem however I thought it would be fun to use one of the Fire Emblem characters in the library.  Bringing in a character is the same as navigating to your mocap FBX file and just pushing open. 

Azura in Motion Builder

To get your motion capture FBX in your character file is very simple as you just open your cleaned and characterized folder holding your animation FBX and drag it into motion builder.  You then merge the FBX into the scene.  You should then see MoCap appear in your characters along with the character rig in navigation.  

Character and Mocap in Navigation

From here I selected the Azura Character and in the Character Settings I changed Input Type to Character and then Azura was connected to my mocap animation!

Changing Character Input Type

Gif of Azura Walking

Gif of Azura Idling 

Hades Facial Rig Reel

Hades Facial Rig Reel

For this project I worked with Hades who was modeled by Ky Campbell from cohort 16.  Hades is a capstone character from Penguin Void Productions' game Kore.  This project was a lot of fun and a big challenge as I have never fully rigged a character's face.  This rig is a joint based facial rig with two blenshapes for squash and stretch. There is also over 70 controllers and this reel only shows a few.  Posing Hades was a lot of fun as his eyebrows are very expressive, his eyebrows are arguably my favorite part about Hades.  A lot of the ideas I got for his expressions were from looking at reference of people such as happy, bored, surprised, nervous, ect. I had the most fun posing Hades as a villian, his smile makes him look more like a villian than happy.  Another fun part of Hades was making his ears.  The ears are very simple but they can be very cartoon like with how you can scale and pose them so I did a pose where I was able to scale one of his ears.   The most difficult part about rigging Hades was his eyes as he has two ways to control his eyes, a controller for each individual eye and another that manipulates both.  Hades eyes can be a bit crazy, but they have a wide range of motion with individual manipulators in the eyelids to completely change his eye shape and controllers that control many manipulators for movements like blinking.  Overall, this project was a challenge and I could have done better in a few areas but this project makes me want to learn more about facial rigging.

No Country for old Men Sprint #7

 For this sprint I worked on three different assets, the phone, shotgun, and bi-fold door.  For this sprint I've come closer to having a solution for the phone cord connection to the phone base and ear piece.  After doing some research I played around more with the phone cord skeletal mesh and using a cube I was able to get it to connect and stay connected to the cube with physics.   It took me many tries as often times the cord would detach from the cube or fly into space.  

Gif of Phone Chord Physics Test

From this step I then connected another cube on the other end of the cord and turned off the physics to see how it would react.  It reacted mostly as expected.  The cord does have some unexpected bounciness to it but the cube on the other end is staying full in tact. 

Gif of Phone Chord Connected to Objects Test

When I simulated both cubes I did find that the cord and cubes reacted as expected.  To make it easier for my team I tried to re-create the same effect with the cord and the actual phone base and ear piece as a blue print with no luck.  It seemed to break every time.  I also selected the entire creation of the box version I made in the outliner and create a blueprint from selection which also resulted in no luck breaking both the version in the outliner and the blueprint.  

Gif of Phone Chord and Gravity Test

Aside from working on the phone cord I also updated the controllers on the shotgun rig.  I adjusted the placement of the shotgun which resulted in a slight skeleton change.  This is to make the rig a bit easier to work with.  

Shot Gun Rig

From here I also added in animator friendly parenting locators.  These locators are for the animator to parent their characters hands to so that then the hand moves that part of the shotgun will move too.  

Shotgun and Animator Friendly Grab Locators

After talking so some of the animator alumni, they said they like it when these locators are scaled up so that they know that they are there for them to parent the characters hands too.  So I scaled up my locators and made sure that they were visible.  

Shotgun and Visible Animator Friendly Locators 

The last asset I worked on was a Bi-Fold door (closet door).  I looked at a lot of bi-fold doors on the internet and watched how they moved.  There is two doors but some of the images I may only show one of the doors.  I started with my joint placement and was really trying to pay attention to where the joints were placed because of the way the door has to move.  

Skeleton in Bi-Folding Door

Originally the door was modeled completely straight which is not good for IK handles.  My thought process was to use an IK handle to create the movement of the door folding when opening.  Without some bend in the joint chain the IK handle does not know which direction it needs to bend.  So while waiting for the model to update I started to get ideas for my controller design.  

Bi-Fold Door Rig

I also updated my controller generator which helped me to create some of the controllers.

Bi-Fold Door and Controller Generator Tool

I ended up taking out the extra rotation controller since the basic movement of this rig was really just opening and closing the doors and some basic knob turning.  There was a model change with the door so I did change the skeleton to fit the new door.  

Adjusting Bi-Fold Door Rig to New Model

After the model changed I updated my hierarchy and put in my basic IK Handle and tested it out to see how it would move.   

Bi-Fold Door Hierarchy

Once I got my basic movement down and I skinned it, I was actually unhappy with the rig.  I saw a few small problems and the movement wasn't what I was looking for so I spent a little time and deconstructed the rig and adjusted it so that it would look nicer and I re-skinned it. 

Skinning Bi-Fold Door

I then tested out the movement and showed my team the rig fully skinned and working.

Gif of Working Bi-Fold Door Rig

And then it was ready to be put into the engine!

Bi-Fold Door in Unreal Engine 4

No Country for Old Men Sprint #6

 For this sprint I continued to work on the phone asset and the rig for our shotgun.  The goal for the phone is to have it be able to move and react based on what the phone base and the ear piece are doing.  The first step to achieve this is to set up the cord, phone base, and ear piece and place them in the scene.  This was taken in our dummy level before it was brought into our main level.

Chord Connected to Phone Base and Ear Piece

I began to work on the physics constraint between the cord and the phone static meshes.  The physics constraint is located on the cord and takes two points it is connected to.  The two points connected is the phone base and the ear piece.  Once I connected the phone I made sure that the phone base did not have simulation turned on and that the ear piece did have simulation turned on

Phone Chord and Physics in Unreal Engine

From here I tested to see how it would react to the environment.  The connection between the phone base and the ear piece worked as expected, however the cord between the two did not stay connected and acted as it did in the previous sprint. aw  

Gif of Broken Phone Chord Physics

For the shotgun rig I did some simple joint placement, controller creation, and updates in unreal engine.  I created an initial skeleton and ran some tests with parent constraints and some simple controllers to make sure the parts were moving properly with the joint placement.  

Shotgun Joint Placement

Shotgun with Controller Placement and Early Controller Generator Tool

Once I got an initial idea for the skeleton I made a folder within our rig folder for the shot gun and imported it so that the skeleton does exist in the project and is easy to update. 

Shotgun Rig in Unreal Engine 4

From here we noticed that one of the parts of the shotgun was connected to the main part of the shotgun instead of it's own piece so I went into UE4 and found the individual piece that was connected and exported it so I could bring it into the rigging file.  I also Exported the main part of the shotgun do that it is disconnected. I also imported a shot gun shell as I will need to rig the shells coming out of the gun when it shoots.

Shotgun Piece that Needed Adjustment in Rig

Updated Shotgun Rig

To understand how a shotgun works and the mindset that goes into rigging weapons I did some research and I got ideas on how to rig the shotgun so that it looks correct.  From our shotgun modeler I looked closely at a video he sent which explains how the shotgun works.  Check out this shot gun video!  I also looked at Simon Mills rig for a machine gun and listened to his logic and the way that he likes to think about rigging weapons. Check out Simon Mills machine gun video here! From here I then updated the rigging file and I updated a tool I am currently programing to help me create controllers quicker. 

Shotgun Rig Updated and Updated Controller Generator Tool

Once I updated my controller I skinned the shotgun to it's corresponding joints and used flooding so that it would have a mechanical feel when all the parts move.   The big consideration here is the fact that on a shotgun everything is very mechanical and rigid.  When the shot gun pump is moved the rest of the shotgun react to that in a series of mechanical steps.  

Shotgun Rig Skinned

Once I finished skinning the shot gun I updated it in unreal so that our other tech artist can also start to play around and test how it reacts in the scene.  Other considerations for the shotgun rig is how much recoil movement I should build in the rig, how does ammo show when the player shoots and how much ammo will the player get, and if the shot gun can be taken apart.