Mafia:
The Old Country
The Horse
The horse was one of the primary aspects that I worked on during my time on the project. I was responsible for porting the animation data from MotionBuilder onto a hand-built rig that I created using a custom-built ‘bridge‘ tool.
As a fun mention, before I left Hangar, I was able to rig the horse’s face and add a placeholder animation that is still in game.
RBF Solvers
I was responsible for setting up the RBF solvers exported for the horse to improve the deformation using a joint-based solution.
Facial Animation - Gameplay
I worked with the facial animation team to develop the Animation Blueprints for the face during gameplay. For certain actions such as running or below a certain health pool, characters will display different facial animations such as heavy breathing or a pained expression.
The Daughter: Isabella
While this was being worked on, I worked with the Character TDs to ensure that the current animations were working correctly with the skeleton, ensuring that there was no quality degradation due to the difference in skeletons. This was done using runtime retargeting in engine.
Tomorrow Falls
Arena Clash/Tomorrow Falls was a project developed by DPS Games. I was responsible for creating production quality rigs alongside my Principal Technical Animator for an assortment of Vehicle Heroes and Characters for the game.
I was also responsible for creating bespoke animation blueprints and modular animation blueprints of varying complexity to allow each hero to utilise unique systems or reuse common functionality respectively.
I worked closely with many members of the studio including Design and Systems and closely along with the Vehicle and Character teams, and the Animation department to create unique heroes for the world of Tomorrow Falls.
Personal Projects
During my spare time, I enjoy working on developing my own knowledge of Technical Animation, Game design and Tech Art tooling. To further this goal, I have started working with some colleagues on a Third Person Roleplaying Game during our downtime.
This project is created in Unreal Engine 5, and utilises Motion Matching, Selectors and Control Rig.
It has given me a further understanding on larger scale projects, Animation for AI, Animation Blueprints for Biped and Quadruped characters and furthering my understanding of Control Rig.
For this project, I have been responsible for maintaining the Perforce depot, allowing me to experiment and understand the administration requirements for a project and ensuring that all developers can submit without issue.