This project was conceived as part of my studies in the Game Animation Program at Animation Mentor, one of the world’s most prestigious animation schools. The primary objective is to integrate locomotion, combat, and cinematic animations into a single project, utilizing custom animation, motion capture when necessary, and developing the required logic to ensure everything functions seamlessly within the engine.
Since this isn’t a real production, I wanted to go a step further and practice different animation workflows while experimenting with disciplines I don’t usually get to explore in my day-to-day work as a full-time animator, such as environment creation, texturing, shading, VFX, lighting, sound design, rigging, and animating directly inside Unreal Engine without going through a DCC like Maya.
After creating a very rough layout pass in Unreal for the cinematic intro, I shot live-action references to help define the duration of each shot, try out different cameras, and explore acting choices without wasting time animating scenes I wasn't sure would work.
My main character is Sparrow, a fierce huntress originally designed to perform ranged attacks by shooting arrows. However, for this project, I found it more compelling to make her move stealthily and perform close-range attacks by stabbing her opponents with a dagger, or even with arrows.
Before starting any animation, I built a custom picker in Maya to speed up my workflow and added scripts to snap IK to FK and FK to IK with a single click. This allowed me to iterate without technical limitations. IK is usually more helpful when exploring key poses, while FK provides clean arcs "for free" during in-betweens. For final polish, I like switching everything back to IK to make sure there are no unwanted spikes in the graph editor. This workflow lets me get the best of both worlds, giving me full control over the final result of each frame by refining a single control instead of the entire FK chain for each arm.
To create the gameplay animation set, I mainly used keyframe animation in Maya, with some sections refined through mocap clean-up. I then integrated everything into Unreal Engine and added the necessary Animation Blueprints and Blend Spaces to ensure smooth transitions between animations.
The final boss in this fictional game is Grux, a wild creature with tremendous strength. Originally, the character holds a weapon in each hand and moves with relative agility, but to create more contrast with Sparrow, I thought it would be more interesting to give him a single weapon and a much heavier, more grounded feel.
Unfortunately, Sparrow’s original rig is quite limited when it comes to facial expressions, but I didn’t let that stop me. To achieve a greater sense of realism, especially in the cinematic intro, I created a MetaHuman using Sparrow’s head as the base mesh. I then hand-painted the textures in Photoshop using my Cintiq to match the original character, and built a Frankenstein setup in Unreal by combining the MetaHuman head with her stylized body.
I also figured it would be useful to have a Control Rig in Unreal for making final adjustments directly in the engine, and I ended up enjoying it so much that I animated several parts entirely inside Unreal.
To reinforce the narrative that this version of Sparrow is completely wild and ruthless, I thought it would be fitting to create messy piles of corpses she collects like trophies. This involved solving several technical challenges, such as creating Physical Assets for dozens of characters to get a wide variety of ragdolls, building Blueprints to stack them, manually posing some of them, and optimizing meshes, materials, and textures to maintain performance.
I used the Valley of the Ancient project as a starting point, then added my ragdoll piles and incorporated several assets from Megascans, KitBash3D, and EasyFog to achieve the final look.
The next step will be to create an execution sequence where Sparrow and Grux interact in the same animation.
