Milo
Rig Demo Reel
Insights
Milo is a character for a student’s short animation feature created for a capstone project class. The animation is called “The Spotlight,” and it has been around in production for two years. Right now, it’s on its final stages of animation and lighting. It’s about two competitive magicians battling over the crowd’s praise and attention. However, they find themselves in trouble after things get a bit too competitive.
At first, I served just as a mentor on various subjects such as modeling, animation, simulation, lighting, rendering, and general pipeline procedures. Later on, the group got a bottleneck regarding the rigging and rendering department. They had already outsourced one of the characters, but the second one was a bit more dynamic, and it was giving some trouble. By then, I was curious about how to do a more cartoony/stretchy rig and decided to get more involved.
The first thing I had to take into consideration was the possibility of this short animation being rendered in
Unreal Engine 4. The team didn’t have access to traditional render farms. Considering this, it made me start the rig with one hierarchy and one skin bound mesh for better performance, and since Unreal doesn’t accept multiple root systems unless you treat them as separate actors.
At some point, I realized that the other rigger didn’t take this into consideration and just rigger the character for the standard animation pipeline. I mentioned this to the group of students, and they decided to stay with a traditional rendering process. I continued the rig as I was already doing since they would not see a significant difference when animating.
Sure, It was going to be more work from me since I had to make sure this “game ready rig” was up to standard animation quality. Regardless, since I have always wanted to focus on video game development, this provided an opportunity to learn ways to improve my skills.
12-28-2019
Credits
Texturer
Concept Artist & Modeler
Software Used
