VR Investigation for mysterious murder
Type : Video game / Motion Capture / VR
Producer : Tequila Works
Publisher : GameTrust
First aired : October, 2017
A first time for Toonkit
We could even say “Two first times” !
First collaboration with Tequila Works and first video game and Unreal Engine approach.
This investigation game offers a complete immersion in storytelling and exploration, on screen and in virtual reality.
On this project, the animations were all motion captured by Solidanim.
The rigging work consisted in the addition of some controllers that would allow to tweak deformations and animate on top of the motion capture.
This project, rigged in Maya, led us to face new constraints when dealing with real-time and to develop export features to Unreal Engine.
Nice and fast deformations
That’s the challenge. Regarding Unreal Engine, deformations had to reach a certain quality standard while remaining fast enough to compute for the real-time system.
Therefore, we worked in control rig only, with an approach similar to the one used for White-Fang, but with the real-time constraints (no blendshapes, limited number of influences …).
Regarding the facial rig, the number of expressions had been defined beforehand for a good optimization of the rig performances.
Similarly, the clothes were not simulated live but in baked from the dynamic Control Rig.
Thus the complete project benefited specific attention to deformations and their performance, in order to adapt to the real time constraints while meeting the artistic needs.
Unreal has a rendez-vous with Maya
Once rigging and animation work completed in Maya, the whole thing needed to be exported to Unreal Engine for integration and rendering.
With technology development, there is an increase in the need for interoperable tools and represent new challenges that we were able to face with this project.