Sneak peak!

I've been given permission to show off some new characters for the upcoming title, Galaxy for Hire! Nym has been shown off before, but she's got a new look and a new rig! The new character is one of the new classes we have in the works. He doesn't have his weapons, so his working with what he's got. Enjoy! Models and textures provided by Daniel Ries. You can check out his work at http://danielries.carbonmade.com/

Trench Games

Head on over to http://trenchgames.com/ to check out the new game I'm involved in.

UDK FBX 2012 Animation Pipeline

Recently I have started to work more closely with the AnimTrees inside of UDK. Along with this, I'm also trying my hand at animating characters. Since I've started working more closely with the animation side of things, I've discovered some irregularities in the FBX pipeline. Here are some interesting bits.

1. My first hurdle was to get my skeletal mesh inside of UDK. For someone who hasn't worked much with UDK, this was incredibly frustrating to start with. I found out that the FBX export will not cooperate if the geometry and the bone hierarchy structure are inside another hierarchy. These two apparently need to be placed inside the world space when it comes to exporting.

2. The FBX exporter allows you to bake animations, with only one problem: You can't bake translations. I have yet to find any kind of documentation regarding this problem, or anyone else coming across this problem. It's incredibly picky as to which bones it wants to bake translations. In order to achieve baked translations, you need to go to Edit > Keys > Bake simulation. Make sure you have all the bones selected, and bake the desired animation. Unfortunately this breaks the rig, so you'll have to export, then undo your baked simulation. This then leads to the next issue.

3. Say you just baked your animation starting from key frame 50 and ending in 109. Export it, import the FBX animation into your AnimSet, and preview it. Blank frames. Maya thought it would be cool if you had those extra frames at the beginning, so instead of exporting 59 frames it went ahead and exported 109. So those first 50 frames are garbage. They do nothing. Your character sits still for 50 frames, then plays the animation.

So enough ranting. Here is the pipeline I used to work around all these issues:

The skeletal mesh, in T pose, is kept separate from all the animations. Each individual animation is contained in it's own Maya file. They all start from frame 1 and end where needed. This will keep Maya from exporting the blank frames. Once I am satisfied with my animation, I save and proceeded to bake my animation on to my skeleton. This will make sure I get translation values on my bones. Once exported, I can import my FBX animation into UDK and not have any problems.

Unfortunately this means I have an FBX file per animation, but it saves my sanity, if only a little bit. I still enjoy working with animations and the UDK, and I'm also hoping someone else will find this post helpful, or peak enough curiosity to ask me questions/give me advice.

Under NDA

Greetings! I just wanted to do a quick update. I have still been doing work but I can't release it on my personal portfolio. If you'd like to see what I've been working on, head on over to http://trenchgames.com/ to see what I've been up to.

We just revealed a new character, Nym, the Nanite Manipulator! I just finished her rig a few minutes ago so hopefully we'll be showing that off some time soon.

Rigging Reel 2011

Put together some of my work for your enjoyment. So here it is!

Rigging Reel 2011 from Chris Camacho on Vimeo.

School and such

Been a while since I last posted an update and I just wanted to keep my blog alive. This spring is my last semester as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas. As part of my graduate project, I am working on an animated short, that you can find here http://cabinfevershort.blogspot.com/ and I'm having to teach myself animation, as we lack animators for the project.

It's coming along very well! In fact I'm looking forward to posting some of the shots I personally worked on. I'm very proud of the work I've been doing for this short and I want to share it on my portfolio, but I want it to be perfect. So I'm still around, just working incredibly hard to finish my degree. I'm hoping to have something posted within the next week!

Drop pod - Rigid Body Animation

For this animation, I used rigid bodies for the top and doors of the drop pod. The whole animation has the pod landing, and the doors bursting open. This was built for use in the UDK engine, but I can't show in game footage due to other circumstances.