When we began working on Elex 2, I revamped our fragile rigging system that I had cobbled together for Elex.
I prefer my character rigs to be simple – not too much automation, fast in the viewport, with the ability to move from control rig animation to an animated skeleton and vice versa. We also implemented an in-house motion capture pipeline using an XSens suit, so I wanted the animation exported from MotionBuilder to be easily loaded onto the rig controls (as baking in Maya is pretty slow compared to MotionBuilder).
Based on the Skeleton
Since I wanted the rig and the skeleton to be interchangeable, I designed the system to be driven by the skeleton. I would create a clean skeleton and do my first skinning iteration for the character with it. Then I would mark the skeleton and set some preferences (this was mostly done in the rig’s build file, as I was the only one rigging anyway). Then one could run the build script, and the character would be built. During production, I would often improve the skinning when I spotted anything wrong.
Key Features:
- Adjustable Control Shapes: Simple way to adjust and save control shapes for the next build.
- Pose Storage: A-Pose (rig) and T-Pose (HiK) stored on skeleton and rig; could be applied at any time.
- Mirroring: Simple limb/control/joint mirroring.
- Space Switching Tool: Efficient space switching for animators.
- Rig <-> Skeleton: Interchangeable rig and skeleton system.
- Dynamic UI: Adds the ability to load any skin/weapon on the actual character; importing and removing faces, suits, and weapons can be done at any time.
Here is a quick Rig Build video:
Creatures Built with These Tools
The same tools and systems were used to build various creatures in the game. This ensured consistency and efficiency across different types of characters and creatures.
Loading Mocap from MotionBuilder
I replicated the control structure in MotionBuilder. This way, I was able to export the retargeted animation to the replicated rig and export it. In Maya, the animation is then directly loaded onto the rig:
Mocap
All human animations were captured in-house with our XSens suit! I was responsible for all shoots, most of them starring our Art Director or other colleagues. Quite a lot of captures were done by me, with me as the actor at home – this was mostly during the Corona pandemic!
I am attaching the Elex 2 Faction Trailer here as it shows a lot of the work I handled on the project (Faces, automated Lipsync, Rigging, Skinning, MoCap Pipeline, Outsourcing Feedback):
ELEX NEXT?
We had many plans for the next installment of the game! One main focus point I had was improving character deformation overall. I updated all of the systems, and we even implemented an RBF solver into our in-house engine!
I don’t have data on this, but I have reworked the correctives here at home and captured and cleaned some movement to show off the deformations we implemented: