I was working on making some ARTv2 rigging tutorials using this model (how to rig a custom asset), but got distracted and decided to get it in UE4 and play around with getting the layered clothing looking okay. Trying to get clothing not to clip into everything can be challenging, and this mesh had lots of layered bits that all needed to collide properly. It’s not 100% perfect, but good enough for the time put into it. I wanted to do more, like add more dynamics to the hair and such, but I figured I should get back to actually making those tutorials I set out to make in the first place!
Unreal Engine
June 2016 Update /
A lot has happened here at Epic since the last post! We've shipped Paragon on early access, we had an amazing GDC showing, and we continue to ship a hero every three weeks. In between all of that, I've been working on the tools when possible.
GDC
McLaren Enterprise Demo
I had the privilege of working with our enterprise division on a demo showing a McLaren 570s in our engine. I rigged the car, which before I started the task, thought would be simple. Turned out, the model was from the CAD files, where every nut, bolt, and screw is modeled out. Needless to say, to took far more time to do than I had anticipated, but it was a lot of fun.
Here are a couple more tidbits from rigging the 570s that the trailer doesn't really show.
The interesting thing to note about this is that there is no skinning information here. It's all static pieces attached to joints, inheriting the joint transformations. Check out the live stream to learn more about that.
Hellblade Realtime Performance Demo
We partnered up with Ninja Theory, Cubic Motion, and 3lateral to do something unprecedented; driving a real-time character through live body motion capture and a live facial solver in UE4.
ARTv2
Since the last update, a lot of progress has been made. Both the arm and torso modules are now done, leaving only the head and chain left (which are probably the easiest of the bunch).
Quick demo of the arm rig.
The auto clavicle has been re-written to use pose space, which achieves much more reliable results.
Quick demo of new finger rig features
Quick demonstration of torso rig features.
One of the things I spent some time on that I'm really happy with was how users install the tools and how they will get updates. The old installation method is messy at best, and prone to errors. Updates are a nightmare. Users need to wait on either new engine releases or know about the dropbox link that holds the latest scripts. It's a mess for everyone, including me.
So I spent a couple days and now have a super simple way of installing the tools.
Now the issue of getting updates. I wanted to investigate the work in adding a feature directly to the tools that would search for updates, and automatically apply them.
Lastly, and this last tool is more for me, I needed a reliable way to generate release notes and a zip archive of the tools that would coincide.
The next update, I should have the head and chain modules done. I'm also looking into writing a 'report a bug' feature that will utilize github's issue tracking system.
Gears of War 3 Work /
Gears of War 3 Rigging Reel
A small sample of the rigging and tools work completed for Gears of War 3!
ears of War 3 Facial Rigging GDC 2011 Talk
This is my GDC 2011 talk about the facial rig setups in Gears of War 3.
Gears of War 3 Pipeline GDC 2012 Talk
My GDC 2012 talk covering the entirety of the rigging and animation pipeline for Gears of War 3 and how the pipeline evolved by learning from past lessons.