Rigging and Animation

Hello, my name is Anna, and I am the lead in rigging and animation for Club Crash. My main responsibility is to rig/animate the four playable characters to bring them to life for a fun and exciting gameplay.

                Starting last semester, the team solidified decisions around character designs, attack mechanics, and personalities of each club. After this initial design phase, production began. I will give a short rundown of my process thus far in animating and rigging these characters. For me to begin the process of rigging, another student created some block models of the characters, which defined proportions for the final models. After rigging these block models I was able to begin animating!

                As with any production, there have been some bumps in the road. The biggest issue that I have come across multiple times is issues importing rigs from Autodesk Maya into Unreal Engine 5. There would be bones missing or out of rotation, meshes would disappear on import, and cloth simulation would not function properly. Luckily, I have managed to troubleshoot and figure out these issues without resorting to any “backup plans.” Other issues consisted of scope limitations in some of the attack animations, but we are still excited to show you what we have!

The models for all four characters are now complete and in engine and the first-pass animations for each character were completed as well! Currently I am focusing on polishing the animations before I can comfortably call them "finished".

                To keep each club member feeling unique to their own personalities and play style, I am ensuring each club’s animations feel unique by adding exaggeration and weight in each of the animations to convey the difference between each character.

                After final polish, I will be rigging and animating NPCs who will be standing on the sidelines to cheer on each club. Their animations won’t be extensive or overly expressive, but we believe it will provide some added interest to the environment.

                Thank you for stopping by to take a look at our game! The team and I are so excited to show you what we have made, and may the best club win!