A long story about animation, characters and skeletons

A very long and very interesting post that was posted in May, but now, three months later, is becoming free.

Story

You may ask me how I came up with the storyline in which Faeena Shay kicks the hapless robot vacuum cleaner, and the robot crawls away resentfully after spinning in place. It's simple: Faeena, like most nymphaids, are unfamiliar with human technology; they don't use household appliances, washing machines, smartphones, generators, or cars. They have magic, which, though energy-consuming for any nymphaid, is versatile and always at hand. However, Faeena has a younger sister, Varvara Shay, who is very interested in humans, their way of life, technology, the Internet and other aspects. Well, since the young Shay clan settled in the forests near the large human city of Koboldsk, Varvara and other active nymphaids have the opportunity to visit it almost every day. And Faeena herself, whether she wants to or not, has to visit the human city to buy building materials, provisions, equipment, because the mother clan Moray will soon stop supporting its pilgrims and will finally send them to free floating. The idea of working closely with humans comes just from Varvara, and Faeena as the Mother of the Kin is forced to integrate into human society so that her still small clan has a chance to survive in the beginning of its existence.

After one of her trips to Koboldsk, Varvara brought a robot vacuum cleaner and left it in the house she and Faeena shared. Faeena couldn't get used to such a neighbor for a long time. It's one thing to have a refrigerator in the kitchen, which stands in the kitchen, doesn't touch anyone and only attracts attention with its humming. But here is a small, crawling on the floor thing that tangles underfoot, scares with unexpected appearances and touches and in general looks like a giant black insect. In general, it will be a long time before Faeena gets used to her new neighbor, and in the meantime it will occasionally get a kick from his mistress.

Animation

The animation lasts 700 frames, of which the first 40 frames are preparatory. The thing is that by default Faeena's ponytail is straightened and hangs in the air (you can see it on the screenshots below). When the rendering animation starts, her ponytail acquires physical properties and falls under the influence of in-game gravity. It looks ridiculous and out of place. So, this is what the first 40 frames are allocated for, which are then cut out of the overall video sequence, and the video starts from the moment when Faeena's ponytail is finally lowered and looks acceptable. You can only notice the swaying of the ponytail at the beginning of the video, this is a consequence of its falling down in the first frames.

The animation itself consists of several phases: the preparatory phase (which is cut in the final stages). Then there is the resting phase, when Faeena doesn’t see the robot and behaves as usual, while the robot moves along the cleaning route. Then comes the meeting phase of the two characters: the robot vacuum cleaner moves out from behind the screen and Faeena notices it. The robot turns and starts to move towards Faeena, and she enters into a pose of fright, at the same time raising her hoof to strike. The final phase begins with a sharp kick, causing the robot vacuum cleaner to jump up and shift slightly backwards. Faeena herself continues to stand in a pose of fright, and only after the robot turns around and tries to drive away does she move into a pose of relief and give the robot a glance.

I am not an expert in character animation, but I tried to accompany each phase of the animation with appropriate movements of Faeena, small insignificant details like rapid breathing, twitching of ears and tail or blinking of eyes. I wanted to make the animations lively, smooth, realistic and at the same time a little cartoonish, and I hope I succeeded. I also had to work on the movements of the robot vacuum cleaner, so that its movements were robotic, linear, with micro-delays before each movement. This is a very long and painstaking process that requires imagination, good knowledge of animation tools for 3D characters and understanding of the basic principles of any animation.

Dope sheet of the animation. On the left are the names of the bones that are involved in the animation, in the center and on the right are the keyframes that make up the animation. By reading the names of the bones, you can guess what part of the body they belong to. The list is incomplete because it doesn't fit the whole screen.

And, for comparison, the animation of the robot vacuum cleaner. As you can see, its skeleton consists of only one bone called Hull. Perhaps the simplest character from the game, which can only move in space and rotate around its axis.

3D models

The animation involves two characters: Faeena Shay and a robot vacuum cleaner. And if the vacuum cleaner robot is extremely simple, then Faeena is a complex actor, which consists of several parts. And inside UE5, there were sockets attached to Faeena's bones: the first one to her head’s bone and the second one to her neck’s bone. All this was done in order to bound the hairstyle and the necklace of the Mother of Kin to the sockets in the future. These are separate objects with their own skeletons and their own physics assets, which can be unlinked from the dryad's main skeleton and replaced with other objects if desired. In this way, for example, Faeena's hairstyle can be changed. This is a handy tool for character customization, but my game doesn’t provide customization. At least not at the moment.

Characters, clothing, hair and other attributes

Clothing is a more complex and sophisticated model. It cannot be bound to a single socket, as clothing must follow the movements of many bones, not just one. Clothing has the same skeleton as the dryad model, even though clothing does not use absolutely every bone in the skeleton. Because of this, both the dryad model and the clothing model can use the same animation. Combined together thanks to the UE5 toolkit, Faeena and her clothes look like a single unit: the clothes fully replicate the dryad's movements, and if necessary, the clothes can be removed and replaced with another one. In addition, any clothing can have its own extra bones for various protruding parts, such as dangling belts or chains, wide sleeves, long dresses, or feathers sticking out of a hat. The physics assets of the extra bones are customized separately and do not affect the main skeleton of the models.

All this allows not only customization of Faeena Shay, but also on the basis of the common dryad model to create other characters, for example, Varvara Shay. Varvara Shay will have her own skin texture, she will have her own outfit, and her head's socket will have her own hairstyle with antlers attached to it. There will probably be other sockets on her body to which additional clothing items can be attached, such as glasses, wristwatches, belts, necklaces, pendants, rings, and more. At the moment, Varvara's appearance is being developed, in addition to the existing look I'm constantly depicting in my drawings. In addition to the two dryad sisters, there will be other NPC-dryads in the game, and they will all be created using the same template. But the two-legged characters, such as satyresses, fauns or humans, will have their own base models, their own skeletons and their own animations. All of this I have yet to do in the future.

A basic dryad model that serves as the basis for all dryads in the game

Faeena's street clothes consist of a black leather jacket, four leather boots with ties, plus she wears the Mother of the Kin's necklace, an invariable attribute of the Mother of the Kin of any nymphaids’ clan. When leaving her home, Faeena always wears her Mother of Kin necklace, but removes it when at home. Also at home, Faeena takes off her street clothes and puts on a light shirt (her home outfit isn't ready yet, so at the moment Faeena wears street clothes everywhere). Faeena's hairstyle is long red hair, gathered at the back of her head into a ponytail with an elastic band. On her antlers hang magical runes that strengthen and stabilize magical flows, as Faeena is still quite young and inexperienced dryad. The texture of Faeena's skin is two-toned gray with dark spots, and her eyes are green.

Faeena's skin texture. Faeena is a spotted dryad, hence her skin is covered in small and large spots.

Faeena's jacket

Faeena's boots.

Mother of the Kin's necklace. The color of the Shay clan is light green, so this color is abundant in the necklace.

The skeleton of the necklace. As you can see, it consists of two bones, one main and the other extra, specifically for the lanyard, for which its own physics are created by the game engine tools.

Faeena's hair and antlers

The skeleton of the hair. As you can see, the ponytail is made up of many bones that give it increased flexibility.

Faeena's antlers with runes tied to it

The robot vacuum cleaner is created by RoboGearLogo, and Faeena will even visit one of their factories as the game's story progresses. This mini-location is already finished and you can have a look at it on my Artstation.

Robot vacuum cleaner. The blue circle on top of the hull gets a glow in UE, during the material creation phase.

The process of creating an animation

The whole process of creating the animations took a very long time. From creating the models themselves to rendering the videos. Naturally, all this was accompanied by an immeasurable number of problems, bugs, and pitfalls that popped up, as soon as you got close to them. I won't list them, because most likely you won't understand anything or experience the level of rage I felt when trying to solve them. I haven't done physics assets in a few years, and in that time I've already lost all the knowledge I had when I was creating a character for the game back in Unreal Engine 4. Those were the days when dryads had a human torso instead of being covered head to toe in fur. So I had to apply my skills of searching for useful guides on YouTube again. Thus, I compiled a whole playlist of extremely useful videos, many of which have gained barely a thousand views but still carry comprehensive knowledge.

But Faeena's ponytail bounces amusingly with every movement, and the lanyard hanging from her necklace swings and jumps. Which means that I have successfully solved the problem. Of course, all these actions have a bunch of parameters that can and should be customized, but I think the end result looks acceptable. One more milestone successfully overcome, one more piece of knowledge stored in my head!

There is a lot of text here, and I had to translate it into English for a very long time (because I wrote the original text in Russian). If you have read all this and, moreover, understood at least some of the information, then you are a great success!