Common Art Week 15 - Final - 'A' Stage

 For this stage I have added The finger rigs and an anti-rotation function for the dress holds. This will largely prevent clipping from happening.

Other than that, I also created the Medusa chase mechanic and the Win/Lose UI. I added a Nav Mesh Volume for enemy navigation and used the “AI Move To” node to set the player as Medusa’s target. Once she reaches the player, the player is frozen and a special attack animation plays. After that, a pop-up menu appears, allowing the player to restart or return to the main menu. The same logic is used when the player reaches the exit, except the Win UI will pop up instead.

Common Art Week 12 - First Bake - 'B' Stage

I added a footstep effect to our main character, “The Rat,” using a Niagara particle system.
I first defined the overall flow and rhythm of the burst timing, then modeled a custom mesh to replace the default sprites. After that, I created a material to introduce color variation and give the effect more visual interest.

To make the effect actually work in gameplay, I added notifications to the character’s animation sequence. These notifies mark the timing of each contact pose and trigger the footstep effect at the correct moment.

Perforce Proof:

Common Art Week 11 - High Res Meshing - 'C' Stage

 I am out side US and is not able to work much. With the help of our lead, I mostly finished the skinning part of it,. I have added a control pannel besides the character for a more smooth experience in controlling her dress.

Here are some of my skinning outcomes: The dress is now deforming properly

Perforce Proof:

Common Art Week 10 - Protomeshing - 'D' Stage

 At this stage, I am focusing on the medusa character rig. I did spend way too many time on this than I expected, and the rig is still not properly skinned. This rig will be done by next week.

I’ve finished everything in this rig except the leg FK and finger FK. What I really like is how the dress reacts to the leg movement. The dress mostly follows the legs and knees, but there are still controls for the dress supports so I can add extra expression. The dress holders also add a bit of drag, which helps convey weight and gravity in the motion.

    Just started on the weight painting process, I can tell these dress holders do their job nicely. I also changed the base of this skeleton to a mocap skeleton for naming convensions.

Perforce Proof:

Common Art_Week 09 HW - Initial Block Out - 'F' Stage

 For the 'F' Stage, I have created a proxy Medusa_Rig which includes all the basic hierarchies. One technique I used is copy weights: I first weight paint without the clothes, then copy the weights onto the clothes, saving me a lot of time. Of course, there is still a lot to improve. For example: adding extra controls for her dress and creating modular animations for her snake hair.

I have also built a reference board for the FXs we might use in our game, including Water, Wind, Interactive sparks and Fire:

 This is the perforce proof:

3DArt W7HW_Simple Crate and Barrel_Part Three

Last week, I sculpted the crate and created both a high-poly and a low-poly version of it. Then I baked the maps in Substance. This week, I painted over it in Substance, layer by layer.

Then I exported the textures to Unreal and captured a high-resolution screenshot of it.

TechArt W7HW _ Animation State Machines

To begin with, I have set up a blend space to control transitions between differen animations: idle; jog and sprint using a variable (BSSpeed).

  In the animation blueprint, find the "State Machines". This is where all the magic happens. I have created a loop, starting from Locomotion to  "Hit the Ground"; "FiringRifleLoop"; "BackOnYourFeet" then finally go back to Locomotion. Each state represents an animation sequence, and each transition icon stands for the conditions that required to move on to the next state.

 

These are the conditions, reading from left to right, from top to bottom.

                         

The float variable (BSSpeed) comes from the vector length of character pawn's velocity. The boolean variable (Firing) comes from the boolean (Is Firing) in the Character blueprint.

  In the Character blueprint, the "EnhancedInputAction IA_Fire", which triggers when the F key is pressed or released, will affect the boolean variable "is firing". When implementing this variable into movement mechanic, I am able to stop the movement input when Is Firing equals True. I added another boolean "Is recovering" to make sure that when "Is recovering" equals True, the movement input is delayed by 1.5 seconds.

  Finally, I create a custom GameMode for my character so that I don't need to set it up everytime.

I have recreated the process on the Mutant character, and instead of old animation states, I made him roar at the end of the fighting action.

 I made some changes in the character BP to make this anim cycle a bit more smooth. This logic divides time into repeating segments of 80/30 (AnimFrame / FramesPerSecond). If the current Triggered-Seconds is less than the threshold, it delays by the remaining time until the threshold. If it’s greater than the threshold, it multiplies the threshold by the segment count, then calculates and delays by the difference between that value and the current Triggered-Seconds.

Perforce Prof & Position: