Sessions

Public VA  PG

Realtime Rig: Helper joints which has a game engine and compatibility with DCC tools

Date  
August 31 (Tue) 14:50 - 15:50
Format  
Session (60min.)
Expected Skill

This session is intended for the artists or tech artists and engineers; particularly anyone below:
* A person who are interested in a design theory and the technical topic in the rig construction.
* A rigger or animator who wants to handle a rotation better more.
* A person who think to run DCC tool's expression or constraint functions in the game engine.
* A rigger who in particular uses Softimage, Maya or MotionBuilder.
* A developer of the plug-ins and scripts of the DCC tools.

Ideas Take Away

* An example of the automatic control of the helper joints and the material parameters which has a game engine and compatibility with DCC tools.
* A design theory and the technical topic in the rig construction.
* Problems and solutions to handle same logics of the rig in DCC tools and the game engine.
* How does a engineer (or tech artist) suggest better ideas by understanding of the artist demands.
* A difference of the implementation of each DCC tool (Softimage, Maya, MotionBuilder); and a way of thinking of the rigging which does not depend on a specific DCC tool if possible.

This session shows "Helper Joints" system that is used by the game development projects in Square-Enix.

The helper joints are not actual human bones, they are many nodes that are inserted for the purpose of improving deformation quality mainly.
Over the past few years, game art has become more complex and character animation is no exception. Therefore, a lot more helper joints come to be needed, and the necessary motions are increasing too. Furthermore, we may handle the more complex motion composition in the game engine at runtime (f.e., Blending, Layering, IK, Physics).
For this reason, driving the helper joints must be solved automatically if possible.

Many artists normally construct a rig in DCC tool to drive the helper joints. In many cases till now, the complicated rig was not a thing handled in the game engine. Those logic were baked as motion data, and exported for the game engine.
Therefore we can let memory consumption by the motion data largely decrease if we handle many helper joints in the game engine. Furthermore, the quality of the motion composition at runtime improves to be able to solve automatically the helper joints. In addition, we can automatically control a material parameter (f.e., strength of the wrinkle by the normal mapping) by applying this system.

This session is intended for the artist who is interested in a technical topic. It will be shown a summary and thoughts including the mathematical topics so that an artist is easy to imagine it.

* The session contents are based on the information provided by the speakers.

  • Ryusuke Sasaki

    Ryusuke Sasaki

    Lead Technical Artist

    Technology Development Division

    SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.