During this task we teamed up with the games design students to create a prototype for a game. Our role was to establish the art style and take control of the art side of the game. With my team with Sarah and Sean, we decided between us that Sarah would handle the character models and rigs, Sean would do the props and environment and I would do some of the environment but mainly focus on the animation.
As a group, we came up with a game that combined ideas from 2 different initial concepts. Our game is a sci-fi first person shooter which includes different puzzle elements to add more interest to the game. These elements include stuff like temperature damage, oxygen levels and power ups. The goal of the game was to kill aliens in the invaded ship, and escape with the captured npc. In hindsight, a lot of this didn’t come to fruition as time constraints only allowed us to implement so much.
The first thing we had to do was establish an art style, as shown in my other blog post in this topic, we settled on a cartoony, ‘Saturday morning’ style. This style included games such as sonic and Mario for inspiration. The style guide is shown below.
Considering feedback, my section of the guide, environments, definitely has too much text and if I were to do it again I would definitely focus on more creative visual elements.
Getting into my role with the environment, I created the walls and railings for the game. I decided to use a modular system, so all the walls were the same size and could fit in together easily. By using planes, it made UV unwrapping extremely quick and easy and I was able to get them done much more quickly.
These were created in blender and I made 4 variations as well as a wall separator. To fit with the sci-fi feeling, one of the walls had pipes and vents, while the other had a screen. I definitely could have added more details to these and I would like to go back and make more variations in the future or if I was to do it again. The walls were textured in Substance Painter, and was a relatively simple task. I used a slightly grainy textured wall to make it seem like it wasn’t just flat colour, as well as metallic elements for the pipes and detailings on the wall. The screen made use of the opacity and emissive channels, to create a slight transparent and glowing effect.
Another prop element I worked on was the railings, shown below. These consisted of planes, spheres and a cube and was also created in blender. The unwrapping of these were also quite simple due to their similarity to the original primitive shapes.
I used the same colour values for the pillar and the ‘screen’ of the railing as the walls, so that it would stick with the style previously established. One thing I did learn from this is that planes in UE5 will not have a back and only have 1 face. So to combat this we had to quickly extrude it, which luckily did not affect the textures that much. Again, I made use of the opacity and emission channels to create the floating sphere and the screens in order to create a glowing effect.
Moving on, I also created a central table, with an animated ship model showing the sections the aliens have invaded. Again I used the same colour values as before so it wouldn’t break out of the art style.
The animation was a very simple one, as it just a rotation of one of the values.
Next, we can move onto my main role in the project. I did nearly all of the animations for this project. This includes the animations for the alien, npc and the player character.
For the alien I first started working all in separate files, copying over the assets from file to file. This was when Rachel came up and was reviewing some of my work and showed me how to use the action editor. Using this action editor made everything so much easier. Therefore, I emigrated all my files over into one file for the animation and from that point onwards, continued using the action editor for animations. This allowed me to do things quickly without having to copy the assets over between files since all I had to do was create a new action and reset the pose.
When animating, the rig was a tiny bit difficult to navigate. This was not on any part due to Sarah’s rigs as all the rigs worked perfectly, it was all due to my lack of experience using a rig with so many controls. Eventually I started to get the hang of it and started working on the basic walk and run animations. These were pretty simple as we’ve done these cycles many a time. These are shown below.
From this point, I used the animation for the running, and added some extra animation on top of it to create the shooting. This was just a simple rotation and slight movement upwards to create a kick effect.
I had to make sure this was quick enough to show in the game without taking up too much time that would interfere with other animations.
Next, I worked on the standing shooting. This used the same kicking effect as above, with slight alterations, as well as a standing pose. I eventually ended up using this standing pose as a default pose in some of my other animations. I chose to do a shooting animation for both the running and standing as when I asked, my team were unsure if they were going to implement both standing and running shooting for these aliens. This is shown below.
From this point, there were only a few more animations my team needed me to complete for the alien. These being a hit effect, a death and an idle animation. I found this great video on YouTube for the hit effect. It was uploaded by the game director of Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and briefly explained the method they used for animation their hit effects.
This was extremely helpful as I was a bit stuck on how to approach the hit animation. The hit, death and idle are shown below. I wanted to really exaggerate the death anaimtion so I went a bit dramatic with it.
For the NPC animations, all I needed to do was a walk and run cycle. As I’ve said before, we have done this plenty of times throughout this course, and therefore it was pretty simple to complete. These are shown below.
Finally, the last section of animation was the player character animation. Because this was a first person shooter, I only had an arm model and the gun models to work with. So, I used a camera and placed it into the middle of the arms to emulate the players’ view. I started off with doing the attack animations for each of the weapons. We had 3 weapons; a shotgun, a pistol and a knife. I made sure when doing the animations to create a default pose that I could use for other animations, something to use as a base. I wanted to make sure I kept in specific animation elements such as interpolation as well as anticipation. For the shooting, both weapons used a relatively simple kicking effect as I didn’t want to add any more clutter to the player’s screen. These two shooting animations are shown below.
I am quite pleased with how these turned out. For some reason, I believe it was time constraints with the games design team, even though these were done a while ago they were never implemented in the final version of the game. This actually goes for a lot of the animations, lots of them never made it into the game and only the simplest, most crucial ones were implemented in time for our play test video.
The next attack was for the knife. For this I decided to go with a slashing effect, similar to what you would see in ‘hacknslash’ style of games. If I had more time, I would have added a few more variations of the knife slash so the game wouldn’t seem as monotonous when playing.
This definitely could have also been a bit faster, but what can you say, hindsight is a gift.
Next I worked on the walking and running animations. These consisted of bobbing effects for the guns as well as a running effect for the knife. Again, looking back, I really wanted to add more to these running effects such as a sway or different variations but we were struck down by time. These animations are shown below.
The next thing to work on was the switching in and out of the weapons. I only did this for the shotgun and pistol as the games design team told me one wasn’t needed for the knife. I wanted it to seem like the weapons would seamlessly move in-between each other while still keeping some principles of animation in tact. Individually, the switch in and switch out are the same keyframes, with one of them just reversed. I did this to save time within the task. These are shown below.
even though these are quite simple animations, I believe their simplicity works well. This is because in a high speed game feel (which is what our original idea I was going off was) any complicated animations would interrupt the gameplay unless we included a pausing aspect which would happen during the animations in the gameplay.
To test how well these flowed, I brought some of these as well as the shooting animations into DaVinci Resolve as video files and to my surprise everything flowed really smoothly.
The final step of the animations was creating idle animations for all of the weapons. Starting with the shotgun, I decided on two different animations. This would add some variation to the idles. The purpose of idle animations is to add something of interest within the game whenever nothing else is happening. For these shotgun animations I just created a simple inspection of the weapons, as if the character is making sure everything is fine. One thing I wanted to make sure was the movements kept any curves within their movement.
For the pistol animation, I decided to do a finger spinning animation. For this idle, the character would spin the pistol quickly around from the trigger. When I first did this and uploaded it to the team, it was looking great and worked fine. But when it came to writing this blog, when I went back to export the animation, the progress on the spinning had been lost. It seemed like the keyframes for the weapon model to spin were still there but it refused to play. I tried going in and animating the spin again, but all that happened was a complete mess up of the character rig and the mesh just broke. So in the animation shown below, you can only see the flicking effect from the hand, no matter what I tried the spin wouldn’t come back and I had to eventually give up.
For the knife idle animation, I took inspirations from many horror media and wanted to create a tracing effect along the edge of the knife. This is seen as a quite menacing effect in media and I thought it could add just enough of a darker side to the character, as if they enjoy stabbing the aliens.
It was initially much slower than this and much more menacing, but I realised we had many things that took too much time to play and cut it down.
After completing all these animations, I was informed by the games design team that the also required versions without the weapons. This took a bit of time to complete as I wanted to keep the files with the weapons parented, for myself and this submission. So, I created new files and transferred all the animations over and removed the weapon, having to do each action individually and copy over all the keyframes. I had to do this for all the player character animations as well as the alien animations.
Overall, in conclusion I am relatively happy with the results of my work and the animations I produced. I believe these animations to be key to the final look of the game. On the other hand I am a little disappointed as for all the animations I completed, only a handful were actually implemented for our playlets video for the submission, and at that all the textures of our final game were messed up. I don’t want to pin any blame on anything but the time constraints we had, but overall the final result of the game is a little disappointing compared to the work we put in as the animation team. I did enjoy this task and if I were too do it again, I would create more variations of each animation so we would’ve had more of a choice of animations.