This was a group project with 11 students over 6 months. It was the first group cg project I worked on and it was so much fun bringing this short to life! Very thankful for my groupmates for their commitment and enthusiasm towards the project.

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I did the rigging for the main character (dark brown hair) using an auto rig as a base. Additional controls were added for his belly, which were joints driven by a curve, similar to a spine rig. His tie was also switchable between a static, simulated and animatable version. There were also additional blend shapes for his neck and belly for more natural deformations. Different versions of the rig was made with different costumes, so animators could switch out the rig reference as they wanted. There was also a proxy version of the rig animators could switch to made of rectangular cubes should animators want a faster playback for body mechanics. 

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I also made a neat rig for a magazine, again with joint driven blendshapes for a more natural animation of its pages flipping.

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I was also tasked to research the integration of this rig to Unreal Engine 4.22 - the first version that supported ray tracing. The pipeline was fine without rtx enabled, but started crashing as soon as it was imported into a version with ray tracing. This was fixed by exporting objects with multiple uvs and materials separately from Maya using a script. We also opted to export animations as alembics, as Unreal did not support joint-driven blendshapes (morph targets) at that time and we wanted tomaintain the fidelity of the face rig deformations in the game engine.

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A friend of mine - Venkat Vemula, managed to get a Golaem crow simulation to work, but the plugin was only available in version 4.20 at that time (if memory serves), so we had to green screen the crowd simulation from 4.20 and comp it into 4.22!

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Lastly, I worked on both the master and shot lighting in the corridor and theatre environments (including the control room and different stage lighting scenarios). 

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