I used Azri for initial practice, as she gave me the opportunity to attempt secondary hair animations in case Caity’s modelled hair needed animated. I was able to figure out from Azri’s controls what I wanted from our rig, such as the heel, ball and toe rotate, to make actions such as walking much more realistic. I also practiced facial expressions for different actions, such as a suspicious or scared look to differentiate between a criminal and a normal customer. For references, I recorded myself doing these actions.
Before I had rigged our character, I uploaded our character to Mixamo and downloaded the skeleton and mesh from there. This was, I could practice animations with our character. However, I only practiced the idle animation with some breathing as it was very difficult to animate as no controls came with a Maximo skeleton. After this, I continued practicing with Azri.
During easter, I tried Mocap for the first time with Jasmin and Cloe. Jasmin wore the suit, while me and Cloe recorded her movements and monitored the suit for when it needed recalibrated. It needed recalibrated often as the metal in the room interfered with the legs and left hand. Because if this, I was only able to capture simple movements, such as pick-ups, put-downs, and scared by panic button animations. We captured several versions of the same actions to make sure I had a reference that was as clear as possible to work from. I only used the actions as reference as I couldn’t transfer the animations over to my rig, due to the number of arm joints in my rig compared to the Rokoko skeleton. Therefore, I imported the skeleton and mesh from Rokoko into Maya and used Jasmin’s key poses as references.
Before animating my game animations with my finished rig, I referenced my rig in a new scene of Maya, ensuring I could not accidently delete part of the rig, mesh, or animation. it would also make my file size smaller and any change I made to my original rig would be automatically saved onto all my animation files.
Caity ended up taking on the Idle, Payment and Step Forward animations, so my final animations included:
Walk
Suspicious Walk
High Pick Up
Low Pick Up
Place Item on Till
Scared by Panic Button
Suspicious Look
Till Pick Up
Pick Up Basket
Right Turn
As our game is set in a shop, I knew the general walk cycle would be very casual, so I looked at other casual walk cycles or inspiration. However, unlike these walks, I knew I wanted a stylised element for our character. I wanted the arms to move like pendulum, almost like rubber which could be moulded into any way. Instead of stopping at a 180 degree angle like a normal human arm these arms would move past that. I kept this in mind for ever movement I made, such as when the customer puts an item into their basket. I felt that this style of animation complimented Caity’s over exaggerated design and model.
For the suspicious walk, I saved the normal walk into a new file and made it sterner and more rigid. I intended this walk for the criminal to give the player a hint as to who it could possibly be, however, I didn’t change the movements too drastically as I didn’t want the animation to completely give away who the criminal was.
For all animations where I was picking up or putting down a product, I used the Mocap actions as references. I downloaded our Unreal Level at the time from GitHub and exported the till and shelves as an FBX. When imported into my Maya scene, it helped me get the exact height as to where the customers would be reaching in the game, making their movements more realistic. The shelves later ended up changing a little in shape and size, so I had to go back to my animations and tweak them to adhere to the new props.
The scared by panic button animation was one of the hardest, as there were very quick changes in how the customer stood, from standing in an idle pose to crouching down with their hands over their heads, shifting the weight from one foot to another. I used Mocap as a reference for this animation also. With all my animations, I had the basket in mind, as I couldn’t do a movement where the basket mesh would collide with the character mesh. This was the most difficult movement where I had to avoid that happening. I kept the left arm a little lower than the right, signifying the weight of the basket. Even though I feel it was my hardest animation, I am happy with he end result, as I feel the mood of the action comes across well, even without facial expressions.
To pick up the basket, I did something similar to how I used the Mocap animations. I imported my previous Azri practice animation and used the key poses from it and tried to copy them as much as possible with our character. I feel the hair in the Azri rig adds much to her movements, so I was sad that I couldn’t transfer those skills over to our character as the customers hair couldn’t be animated.
For most of my animations, Ryan asked if I could create multiple versions, as he intended to have some customers only holding one item without a basket. For the walk cycle, suspicious walk, pick-ups, put-downs, suspicious look and panic button scare, I created versions where the customer would either be holding a basket, holding an item, or holding nothing at all as they put an item in their pocket. I feel this helped greatly adding more versatility to the actions and the characters, especially since we ended up only having one character model.
When we tried to import my animations into Unreal, errors kept occurring with the character mesh and skeleton. I received feedback from Alec, who told me to both change the names of the copied bones from my FK switch arm as they were being renamed in Unreal, and to unbind the FK skeleton from the skin. I had made this mistake when making the switch, therefore after I had fixed the rig, I had to re-export my animations again.