(First 32 seconds animated by me)
Overview:
Ancient Dance was the final project of the second year, we were challenged to work as an outsource team as animators but due to the lack of request for outsource animators we started a cinematic project with part of the team. Three animators worked full-time on the cinematic while two animators outsourced full-time for a game project (Lumberjacked). I worked on both projects simultaneously, on Lumberjacked as rigger, on Ancient Dance as animator and on both as art lead.
(Ancient Dance is a real-time cinematic in Unreal)
Ancient Dance was the final project of the second year, we were challenged to work as an outsource team as animators but due to the lack of request for outsource animators we started a cinematic project with part of the team. Three animators worked full-time on the cinematic while two animators outsourced full-time for a game project (Lumberjacked). I worked on both projects simultaneously, on Lumberjacked as rigger, on Ancient Dance as animator and on both as art lead.
(Ancient Dance is a real-time cinematic in Unreal)
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My Contributions:
Setting up the project and managing the planning This project started with one big challenge, the only limit that had been set when we started this project was our time-frame: 8 weeks with 4 animators. Very soon we had decided on a cinematic based around dance so I started making arrangements for such a cinematic. I took all the communication and arrangements on me, I contacted multiple dance schools until I had found three professional dancers that were willing to do a motion capture shoot, after this I had to keep in contact with them to work out the details such as location etc. I contacted multiple teams within IGAD to find characters and an environment and after that arranged for the perforce access, proper contact and credits. After planning the shoot and directing the shoot, I made sure the planning for the team was optimized so the animators could focus on cleaning up the data and implementing it into engine. |
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Supporting teammembers with new skills
All the animators in my team wanted to learn how to make a skeleton and how to skin so I wrote a document to explain how making a skeleton worked inside of Maya, what sources were good to look at, what to pay attention too, etc. I also looked at any issues they ran into and helped them solving them, which was very interesting because I had to look at rigging in a different way because I now for the first time had to explain why I made certain decisions and why certain sources were better to follow than others, which in my third year proved helpful when second years started coming to me with questions regarding IK/FK rigging. (To the right, skeleton created for teaching purposes) |
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Cleaning up Motion Capture data
The first solo dance of the video was cleaned up by me, I had cleaned up data before but dancing gave interesting new issues because for instance during the big jump at (23 sec) the arm was twisted wrongly but cleaning that up during a dance performance is way more precise, which led to me having to be more careful with my reference material. After the big clean-up I used the pose library for final tweaks such as hand position. |
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Optimization
Within the first two weeks I optimized the environment that was originally created as a unreal tournament level by removing all unneeded parts and redoing some of the set dressing of the middle area so nothing would interfere with the dance. In the final week of the project I redid the lighting to highlight the dance and create the correct shadows. |
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