Tech Art Week 7 - Animation Blueprints and State Machines

 

Animation Blueprint setup exercise. There was a point where state machines made no sense, but they're not so bad once you wrap your head around transition rules. Model an animation from Mixamo.

My setup made use of the state alias feature for clarity. I actually discovered this during RPP 3 while working on Caw and Response. The alias (red node) basically acts as a portal to another part of the anim graph. Very nice for organization.

Tech Art - IK Retargeting in Unreal Engine

What an incredibly fun and flexible system! I managed to sneak this into my RPP project as well. Very straightforward setup as long as you are thinking about it from the beginning of the project.

 

Tech Art - Archer Rig

 

 Rigging assignment. Basic FK setup.

 

 

 The archer model provided some really interesting challenges I hadn't considered. Weighting all the layered clothing to look somewhat decent was a huge challenge. Most interesting was the sash and back padding, which need extra bones with node driven offset to look convincing.

 

I also took the time to update my automation tools to support a cleaner implementation of FK control generation. The previous version used offset groups to apply transformations to control shapes. The new implementation bakes the world space transform of any bone on to the offset parent matrix of the control. I also have a system to re-parent disparate chains while preserving the main offset matrix. This rig still required a few offset groups on controls to support the motion I wanted, but this implementation is roughly half the density of the older one.
 

Chest Master Study - Final Renders

Final renders for my 3D Art boot camp project. 

This project, by in large, is the most successful I've been in terms of executing on a vision of a project. I immediately knew I wanted to recreate the VFX and rigging present in the original image. I managed my time well and ended up with a piece I'm very pleased with.

 

Base color, Detail Lighting, wireframe, and full composite.

 

Reference image.

 

The Coin effect is a Niagara system base on this tutorial.

 

 

Geometry with VFX applied versus non. 

The main main VFX, the swirling energy and pulsing rings are all done in a single shader. Rings are SDF's and do not reference any textures. The cones are done with a scrolling noise with polarized texture coordinates.

Here's the material graph before and after cleanup. I used material functions for code that would be repeated a few times, which only ended up being the circle SDF's.

The baking process for this piece was the largest struggle point. Splitting up the mesh more like the professional did in the real game asset will solve the issue.

Tech Art - Blueprinting

Silly little blueprint project for tech art. Standard timeline and interface management. The one cool pattern I learned was how to efficiently tell a game manager about a list of assets. The manager receives a message from each actor to add it to an array held by the manager. Much more performant and consitent than GetAllActorsOfClass. 

Chest Master Study - Game Res, Bakes, and UV's

Finalized low poly and bakes of this chest asset.

4k Texture for the body, 2k for the orb.

 

 

Standard UV techniques for the body. The sphere is 2 haves stacked on each other, this the purple color.

 

 

First pass of texturing and some VFX experiments are also complete. 

 

 

Reference

Tech Art Work - Lighting A Scene

This week's tech art assignment was to light a precomposed scene. Lighting full scenes is something I have no real experience in. Thankfully my cohort members had my back (thanks Jazz!). I knew I wanted to highlight that mast, so I found a nice pocket for the sun and added some height fog for dramatic effect.

Reference image.

 

 

Tech Art Basics - Perforce and Unreal

 

    Familiarizing myself with asset management and version control in Unreal Engine. Basic scene assembled with parts from various modular kits and asset packs. Learning Perforce for version control is really unique. It's not hard to wrap your head around, but all the logistics surrounding it make learning quite a fun challenge. Check out the file structure below.

 

 

Meet Mat - The Search for the Mailman

 

 

 

    Texturing assignment based in the Meet Mat competitions that are held online. This was my first time rendering using IRay. My meet mat is a dog stuck in a mailbox (he was looking for the mailman).  I knew I wanted to change the base mesh in some way while maintaining the main silhouette of the original model. I played around with tentacles and food, but once the dog idea hit I got attached.

    

    My Painter workflow is pretty standard, using fill layers and masks to drive material attributes. I like to really mess around in my base color whenever I can to achieve a stylized, varied look. I use lots of position gradients and the 3D distance generator a lot.

Albedo pass in substance viewport. 

 

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    I ended up using a lot of Substance Designer in this project. My first challenge was creating a rock texture that really captures the scattered garden rock aesthetic I was looking for. The base layer of pebbles is just a Voronoi noise warped with Perlin. Then I made a few bigger shapes with blurs and warps. 

 

 

Small Rocks

 

Big Rocks

 

    All combined with some extra noises layered on top.

 

 

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         I knew I wanted a more stylized look for the piece. I usually sculpt details when I'm doing wood, but with the time constrain I wanted to see if I could get a nice stylized height map out of Designer. The common workflow for wood is to use a warp on anisotropic noise for the main grains. Applying that logic to larger shapes gave me a nice result. I basically made a really thick anisotropic pattern using a tile sampler. I then spent a while messing with various warp textures, blurs, and levels nodes to get a some thicker lines, which took out all of the midtones. I blended the original texture together with the resized one to reintroduce some height information.

 

 

 

Main grain height map

 

Substance viewport.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My FIEA Entrance Portfolio

    Hello! I'm Trevor Farriss, a member of Cohort 23 at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. I am an aspiring technical artist, which is a recent development. I spent my entire undergrad (and beyond) trying to be a character artist. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with shader authoring, which lead to rigging and tools development, and now I'm here. Below is a collection of work that got me into the program. Each has their own post if you'd like to take a deeper look. I'm hoping to use this blog as a journal to catalog all the techniques I pick up in the coming year. 

   My entrance piece for FIEA. This project was an attempt to make a comprehensive real time rig, as well as learn how to integrate python into my workflow in Maya. Rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Everything was made by me.

    

     

    Punch Primate has a full face rig, IK and FK switches for his arms and legs, face topology that reacts to where he's looking, and support for the areas of fat on his body.

 

    Throughout this project, I started building out my own set of tools that would speed up my workflow. My methodology was whenever I ran into a thing that I didn't want to do, I'd try and make a script for it. This ended up ballooning my time spent on the project by a LOT. Thankfully I had plenty of spare time. This project was made during my final semesters working at IRSC.

Hi res images and more breakdowns are on my ArtStation.