Final Presentation: Howl's Moving Castle

For this last turn in, I worked on implementing animations that Marshall created using my castle rig. At first I attempted to incorporate them into an anim blueprint, then just a spline actor blueprint, and eventually ended up just hand keying the transforms and using a fade between the walking and sitting animations to get the timing and blends we wanted. 

Overall, I'm very proud of myself and my teammates for how this project turned out!

Heres the keyframes in the sequence with the animations.

The castle on a transform path.

The old BP Spline.

Link to our last presentation:

Final Presentation: Ghibli

 Sprint #5 Delivery: Howl's Moving Castle

For this sprint, I did a lot of waiting, fixed a lot of bugs, and finally got the castle fully skinned and  into engine with a skeleton that works for its moving parts.

I created a Full Body IK rig for the castle in unreal engine, but it gave me unwanted results since I did not want the body to translate with the movement of the legs,

so I also created IK for the legs only.

Here he is with his IK feet displayed.

In the end, I ended up using the Full Body IK since I was no longer doing a walk cycle animation because of a lack of time. I added his animation blueprint into the sequencer and troubleshooted it with Amritha. There was an issue getting the animation to sync up, but we fixed that in the end.

I added Physics volumes to the upper parts of the castle to simulate with the castle subtle movements, but because of the delays we had in the middle of the week, I couldn't get the results I wanted with the time I had. 

With the weeks we have left, I plan to transfer the skin weights from the newest geo to my maya rig, and animate the sitting sequence in maya. That way I have full control of the rig and can finesse things in engine with a control rig skeleton. 

 Sprint #4 Delivery: Howl's Moving Castle

For this delivery, I worked on the third pass of the Castle rig, and reviewed the placement of the pipes/building/pieces etc, moving pieces to match the castle as I saw fit. I used the same skeleton with a few extra bones for the top pieces, and fixed the IK legs so that the feet are sticky, and stay in place when his knees bend. 

Rig Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7HwzorgCv8

I also created the PowerPoint presentation here: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation

We may no longer have a reliable animator, so I will be skinning this beast and then going into engine to procedurally animate him doing his walk cycle.