Clay Beats
Roles and Responsibilities:
Prototyped and iterated on core multiplayer systems including overworld navigation, NPC interaction, and a cooperative rhythm mini-game in Unreal Engine 5.
Used Maya and Blender to create dynamic and animator-friendly rigs for 3D characters including IK/FK switches, independent hips, and python-driven facial expressions.
Created lively character animations in accordance to gameplay and narrative needs, including walk, idle, and interaction cycles.
Utilized animation blueprints and visual scripting to integrate character and prop animations with gameplay in Unreal Engine 5.
Scripted robust character feedback systems that respond to triggers associated with player performance.
Game Overview:
Clay Beats is a goofy pottery-based couch co-op rhythm game! Players must work in harmony to explore a colorful overworld, talk to plucky animal characters, and master the art of musical pottery. Following in the wake of lighthearted family rhythm titles like Trombone Champ and Just Shapes and Beats, our team set out to create a silly musical experience that anyone can enjoy, from genre newbies to rythm game enthusiasts!
Character Rigging:
As the primary technical artist for Clay Beats, I was responsible for the creation of animator-friendly rigs for 8 unique 3D characters. While I previoulsy preferred creating full character rigs in Maya, I decided to take this project as an opportuntity to become familiar with Blender’s rigging workflow. Each rig follows an industry-standard template to assure ease of use for multiple animators, including IK/FK switches for the arms and tails, indepedent hip and ankle bones, custom control icons, and locked/hidden controls. I addition to the rigs, I also created over 80% of the character animations featured in-game. This dual-role made sure that any issues with the rigs could be quickly tested and solved during the animation process! All characters featured on this page were both rigged and animated by me.
One challenge that I faced during the rigging process was working with imperfect 3D models. While the 3D artists on our team absolutely killed it with beautifully rendered and excellently proportioned characters, we were all students still learning professional development workflows, and occasionally I would receive a character model with wonky topology, non-symmetrical limbs, or similar minor issues. This was a great opportunity for me to practice my troubleshooting skills, as I personally edited character meshes to deform more cleanly around the joints, utilized mirror modifiers to replace uneven appendages, and eliminated extraneous quads to prevent clipping issues. I made sure to be in constant communication with the art team during this process, always clearly explaining what changes I was making and requesting feedback from individual modelers before altering their hard work.
Animation Programming:
Clay Beats allowed me the excellent opportunity of working with the same set of characters across the entire development workflow, from rigging and animation to in-game implementation. I was responsible for the creation and management of animation blueprints for every major character in the game, covering core systems like overworld player movement and NPC interactions, as well as sillier features like player-led slap contests and paw swiping during the rhythm game segments. This required closely working with the engineering team to integrate my animation blueprints with their gameplay scripts.
Dialogue Callout System:
After completing the rigging, animation, and associated scripting for each major character in Clay Beats, I was tasked with the creation of a dialogue callout system. The direction for this idea was that a character would stand near the notes during each rhythm mini-game and offer positive or negative feedback according to player performance. I began this process by meeting with the engineering team to go over their note-spawning scripts and get an idea of how player input and feedback was currently being tracked.
With this knowledge, I created a test callout blueprint using the Owl character. I set up a custom event that takes a boolean as an argument, determining whether to intitiate a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ callout. The script then randomly selects an animation and dialogue snippet from arrays of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ assets, playing them along with a ‘crumpled’ paper animation I set up using the Paper 2D Sprite system in Unreal. Playtest feedback was invaluable during this time, allowing me to adjust the frequency and speed of each callout until they felt as polished and responsive as possible! Featured below are snippets of the callout script represented by Unreal Blueprints.
Wrapping Up:
Being a primarily solo developer with experiece in technical game design, it was extremely eye-opening to work on a large team as a tech artist and animation programmer, and I am immensely proud of what we were able to accomplish! In addition to gaining in-depth experience with Unreal engine and character animation, I was able to greatly improve my professional communication and ability to coordinate between specialized disciplines in a large team setting. Keep an eye out for updates in the coming weeks, as we commit to continue improving Clay Beats with additional content and features during our live ops campaign!
Clay Beats is out on Steam, and can be played here!
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Production Time: 9 months
Size of Team: 29
Roles: Character Rigger, Animator, Animation Programmer
Link to Playable Game: Clay Beats on Steam
A major success for my Blender workflow was the ability to create custom sprite-based facial animations as part of the overall character rig, negating the need for multiple keyframed animations. This was accomplished by importing the facial animation frames as a single material plane and keyframing that plane to the character model. I then added a subdivision surface and shrinkwrap modifier to the plane, naturally conforming the sprite to the contours of the model’s face. This plane could then be weight-painted like any other part of the mesh, ensuring natural deformation as it follows the rest of the character’s head during animation. Next, I added a simple Python-based expression to the plane material, which changes the sprite frame depending on the expression’s value. Finally, I used a driver to connect the expression’s value to the local position of a custom face bone whose movement had been limited within a small range. The result was a customizable and easy-to-use facial animation system that allowed animators to quickly keyframe various expressions on the same timeline as the rest of the character’s movement!
One especially rewarding task was the creation and implementation of a ‘slapping’ mechanic, which allows each player to freely slap at breakable pots in the environment between levels. After experimenting with several animations in Blender, I decided that a combo system with multiple swiping poses would be neccessary to ensure that slapping remained a fun and repeatable action throughout the course of the game. First, I created a custom animation blueprint for each player character that uses a tree filter to seperate upper and lower body bones. This ensures that players can slap while walking, and only bones above the waist will engage in the slapping pose. I then set up transition rules between each animation state, which could then be called by the player movement scripts. The last step was the most challenging, as I had to create the actual slapping mechanic using Unreal Blueprints. The below image displays a snippet of this script, which detects player input, determines hit timing, and calls to the animation blueprint to determine transitions between combo, idle, and recovery states.
Technical Art Work:
In addition to my work as a rigger and animation programmer, I handled various tech art tasks throughout the Clay Beats development process. Featured below is a cartoon water shader that I created using Unreal Engine’s shader graph, inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The WIndwaker’s charming island aesthetics. First, I painted a black-and-white tiling caustic texture in Photoshop before exporting to Unreal. I then layered multiple texture instances over one another that pan across the screen at different rates and hues, forming an illusion of depth. I then created a simple wave direction system that allowed artists to quickly set up material instances with varied wave speeds, offsets, and positions by selecting values stored in a Vector4 parameter. Finally, I plugged the wave direction into the world position offset node to create a 3D effect wherein waves physically roll up and down across the screen. Creating this material was a great way to familiarize myself with Unreal’s shader graph, and am I excited to continue utilizing it’s capabilities moving forward!
