Arid is a first person survival game set in the Atacama desert. Your cargoplane crashed, stranding you in this desolate place and starting your battle against the harsh and unpredictable environment with little more than debris at your disposal.
STEAM PAGE ROOKIES PAGE DUTCH GAME AWARDS 2021
Arid is a finished student product available on Steam, and won Best Student Game at the Dutch Game Awards 2021! As a gameplay animator, my responsibility was delivering high-quality character animations for first person and implementing these (through blueprint). I have also created a cinematic for the end of the game. Most of the gameplay animations are be keyframed, but combined with Motion Capture for elaborate or intricate animations and the cinematics they have created an optimally realistic and polished feel.
Showreel Gameplay Animation and Showreel Cinematics will be placed here soon.
Look at my 'older' reels here:
Aside from handkeying the arm mesh in Maya for every animation that is created, I have also been respnsible for correctly exporting and importing into the engine, as well as creating some of the functionality for them. I have created blendspaces for natural blending between walk and run, for example.
Two things about this project that were new to me and that I am proud of, are the animation blending and the climbing for the PlayerCharacter. Using Blend Per Bone for blending the right arm instead of the usual top and bottom half of the body has been a real eye-opener for me. When using the clavicle of the right shoulder as the bone to blend from, it works seamlessly. The only tricky thing was the flask (which is a separate skeletal mesh, much like the flare gun) and debugging the synchronization.
Process Specifics
PlayerCharacter's gameplay animations were keyframed in Autodesk Maya 2020, using real-life reference.
Animations were implemented in Unreal Engine 4.25, blueprints and functionality made by me and the lead programmer of the team, Thijs Bouwhuis.