vivarious
Rigs and animations
2019/2020
The team
Going into my 3rd year at Abertay University, I knew I would be given the opportunity to participate in a group project where we would work for a client. Before the year began, a student from Computer Games Technology course contacted me directly to recruit me as an animator for his team. I soon found out that all the people he had sourced excelled in their courses and produced some amazing work. Although finding this very daunting, I was also very flattered and couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to work with such a talented group! After banding together, we eventually named ourselves RealmWelder.
Logo by Harry Pollock
Project summary
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The brief we received was from St. Andrews University. They asked us to create a game/experience based around cell/creature evolution. After many meetings discussing their vision as well as ours – we were able to confidently set off on creating their game, which was soon named Vivarious. The game was to be a lab simulation showing the evolution of carnivores and herbivores, as well as showing how they would interact. In this project, my main areas were art, 3D modeling, rigging, sound sourcing, music, and most importantly animation. While I did resource royalty-free sounds and create music for the game, unfortunately, they were not implemented. By the end of the project, no-one actually knew how that ended up happening, it was simply overlooked.
V2 robot
development& Animations
Once we began our project, we quickly sorted out our pipeline. In this pipeline, I had to wait to receive models of the 6 separate creature models. At that time, I was assigned the task of designing and creating a lab robot (Named V2) that would assist the player in learning the game mechanics. While modeling V2, I encountered many issues with retopology. So I turned to our team lead, Aaron Wyatt, for assistance. After working together to create a final V2 model, I was responsible for rigging and animating 2 simple idle animations.
V2 robot
Original v2 sketches
V2 robot
modeling, rigging, & Animations
Assistant modeler & textures by Aaron Wyatt
creature Animations
Once I received the creature models, I was able to begin rigging and animating them. Altogether there were 3 carnivore models and 3 herbivore models which required 4-5 separate animations each. Eager to start, I began with the carnivores - simply because I was more confident with bipedal creatures. Once I got into the swing of animating the carnivores, taking on the multiple legs and wings of the herbivores seemed a lot less daunting.
Carnivore creature Animations
Models and textures by Harry Pollock
herbivore creature Animations
Models and textures by Harry Pollock
Audio
Although my sound work never made it into the game, I still have copies of the tracks I created and audio moodboards of the sounds I sourced. It was my first time creating tracks, as well as using audio and mixing software I'd never seen before, and though daunting at first, I'm really satisfied with the outcome.
music tracks
audio moodboards
