Game Animation

Neo Shao Ying - 3D Game Animation Showcase

Hello everyone! I’m excited to share my game animation work done over the course of my time at 3dsense Media School as a Game Art animation student. I will also go in depth on several selected works that I feel best represent the fruits of my education here. I hope you will enjoy what you see!

Piper: Character Introduction

Introducing Piper! (Original rig by Kiel Figgins)

A knight, although with a small stature, but with a large heart of courage.

For our second term of school, we were tasked to choose a rig to use to create gameplay animations with. My main inspiration behind this character concept was the idea of Joan of Arc, who held a sword and flag as she led her troops into battle during her time.

While I was initially drawn by the cute quality of Piper’s design, I wanted to convey through the animation a sense of bravery and duty as she slashes her way in with this introduction. As she gets up, the camera circles her in anticipation for the next action she does - summoning her flag from the heavens. After calling upon the flag - a representation of the kingdom she protects - she does a rally cry to end off the sequence, to signal the beginning of something new.

Below are a couple of thumbnail ideas I roughly sketched out for this introduction animation during the conceptualisation stage:

This was also the first assignment that allowed me to learn about film, camera and the importance of proper framing. Notably, between the initial blocking phase and the final render, there were quite a few changes made to the camera movement, from initially attempting to follow the camera movement in the original reference almost to a tee, to adapting it such that the camera movement is overall more readable, and the animation could in turn be properly seen.

After the spline stage of the animation, the final animation was then brought over to Unreal Engine 5, where I had more free reign over the lighting, environment and even VFX to further enhance the concept. The environment present in the final render was made from scratch, with most of the props mainly from the Dreamscape: Stylized Environment Tower asset.

Through Unreal, I was also able to add additional effects to make the flag appear more like a divine object as it appears in the form of a glowing object; a blessing to inspire courage. To achieve the dissolve effect, I made the following emissive texture that would dissolve into transparency with the help of a Material Parameter Collection (MPC) in the Sequencer to time the dissolving effect. 

The glowing particle effect that appears with the flag was then made with a simple Particle emitter under a Niagara system with a Spawn Burst Instantaneous module. To tie everything together, I decided to make use of the lighting system available in Unreal to create a backlight for the final shot, including the addition of god rays thanks to the Volumetric Fog function. Below are the various references used for lighting the overall scene, and a still image of the final shot:

Piper: Attack Animation

As part of our second term’s gameplay moveset project, another assignment we were tasked with is creating an attack combo animation. This is one of the works that I am most proud of as well, as I felt it showcased the weapon choice of a sword and a flag well.

The attack opens up with a double sword slash, followed by a spear stab. Afterwards, it ends off with a spinning attack, using both the sword and the spear in a finishing flourish, befitting of a knight that is meant to make an entrance at the forefront.

The biggest challenge I faced for this project was finding a variety of movements that involved both a sword and a polearm as reference material, since this sort of weapon combination is not commonly seen in media as compared to just a sword, or a sword and shield. The final reference mainly uses a variety of movesets by Motion Actor Inc, with any additional references meant to further enhance the key poses.

One of the key points I would also like to highlight with this animation is the flowingness of the flag as it is being swung, which I felt really highlighted the grandeur of the attack movements. This was a trait that I really wanted to highlight, even from way back during the character conceptualisation stage at the start of the term. Due to the complex movement, the flag movement was first created using Spring Magic, and manually cleaned up afterwards. I felt this really added a lot of flavour to the final animation as a result.

Conejo: Boss Introduction

Finally, to end off my submission, I would like to introduce an animation themed on the idea of a Boss Introduction - a project that I also got to work on during my time in school. For this animation, I used the Conejo rig by Kiel Figgins as the main boss, and the Orelai rig by Christoph (The Stoff) Schoch as an unfortunate victim.

Being technically the second cinematic animation project I got to work on, I wanted to go for a concept with darker undertones this time, since I had used the bright, cute image of Piper previously.

The keywords that drove the idea of this animation are unsettling, unhinged, and unrivaled.

The scene opens with Conejo trudging forward, with an already defeated Orelai hanging limp by her heavy sword. She then flings Orelai towards the screen, which transitions to a close up shot of her twitching, before she lets out a battle cry.

One of the bigger inspirations behind this work is the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask with its mask concept and the dark themes of the overall game. Despite its dated graphics in today’s standards, the transformation scene in particular left a huge impression on me with its uncanny twitching movements when I first saw it years ago, which I wanted to convey through the subtle movements in this animation.

Below are some initial ideas that I drafted out during the conceptualization stage:

Initial ideas included integrating Piper (from my second term work) into the scene, as seen in the second image above, where the animation plays out like an encounter cutscene and Conejo (the boss) rises up to battle as she puts on her mask. However, after some thought, it didn’t feel quite boss-like given her dark appearance, and heavily relied on the context of the player entering the scene to drive the narrative of the boss fight.

Thus, the overall direction was eventually revised to lean slightly more towards the first concept from above, but with a more ominous entrance of Conejo already carrying a fresh victim on her sword. Her actions were also pushed further to appear more ferocious and unsettling, as shown by the strength she displays by flinging her victim with her large sword.

After finalising and filming the revised action reference in real life (which included the breaking of an actual sword prop), I created several style poses in Maya, and experimented with various camera angles to see which one would be the strongest in terms of storytelling.

An initial idea from the storyboarding stage was to have Conejo’s mask slightly misplaced, presumably from having fought a ferocious battle before this cutscene, and her putting it back on before doing a roar. This idea was eventually scrapped, however, in favour of simplifying the actions and making it more readable.

One of the challenges faced throughout was ensuring that Conejo felt menacing throughout, befitting of a boss character, from the character movement to the overall environment. To try and achieve the “unhinged” effect I was going for, a lot of my references for Conejo’s character in this animation were heavily based on zombies, the undead, and twitching actions that are usually associated with this trope. I wanted to create a creepy, yet looming presence for her.

For the set dressing, I built my environment in Unreal using assets from the Undead Lands asset in the marketplace, as I felt that the spiky rocks and the various props could further highlight the strength and ferocity of Conejo as a menacing boss. I also felt that the skeletons scattered around the set also highlighted her strength, that there were many adventurers that came to challenge her before but failed.

In terms of lighting, I wanted to go for a creepy, unsettling environment. Here, the Exponential Height Fog and Volumetric Fog functions in Unreal did a lot of wonders in creating this unsettling, foggy environment through the use of fog in the background.

Ultimately, I wanted the overall animation to be dark (figuratively and a little bit more literally as well), but readable at the same time in terms of storytelling intent. Below are several references I constantly referred to while lighting the scene in Unreal, compared to several still images of my animation at the bottom.

Closing

Thank you very much for reading until the end! I hope you enjoyed it.

I would like to thank my animation mentors Ricwan and Justin for their invaluable knowledge and guidance, my friends for always inspiring me and giving me opinions on my own work to further improve it, and to my family as well for the support they’ve given me during this one year. It has been an enlightening learning experience, having been able to learn not just animation, but a wide variety of skills and knowledge I’ve gained throughout this entire journey, and I greatly look forward to what the future holds as well.

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