Animation Techniques used in Paragon and January Game Jam Theme Announcement - Live From Epic HQ

Finally something im really interested in! Definitely gonna check into this one…

Questions:

Animation:

  • Are you using mocap clips for the character anims or custom handmade animations?
  • Do all players share the same skeleton or does each player have his own skeleton with custom proportions and animations?
  • How is that then dealt with in the blueprints, are all the movement functions in a class that the individual characterBPs inherit from?
  • How did you do facial animations, with mocap or handmade? And do they show up ingame or only in cut-scenes?
  • Do you use any LOD system that involves the facial animation system? (or is facial only covered in LOD0 and all other LODs dont have facial rig?)
  • Are you using any form of IK solver for arms and legs?

Rigging (ignore these if you planning on a dedicated stream for character rigging in paragon):

  • Are you using ART to do the base character rigging or a completely custom solution?
  • Did you use any special technique to solve intersections between rigid pieces of armor on moving characters?
  • How are the facial rigs built? Completely bone based? Completely BlendShape based? Or a balanced mix? Are you using dynamic maps for wrinkles and blood flow? - if so, can you breakdown the system?
  • What technique are you using for hair physics? Dynamic joints? Cloth sim? Other? Nothing?
  • How detailed is your deformation rig in terms of anatomical deformation? (number of correctives, additional helper joints, etc.)
  • Some statistics: Number of LODs, avg number of bones per character/lod, avg number of polys per character/lod, 4 or 8 influences per vertex?

Thats it for now… Ill update this if I can think of more.