The Flamingo Swing Cinematic is a collaborative project I worked on at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. I served as the creative director managing a team of six other artists. The story revolves around a competitive game of mini golf between two flamingos. The animation was developed as an in-engine cinematic within UE4. My responsibilities on the team included developing the storyline, scheduling weekly tasks for other artists, retopologizing and integrating assets into UE4, and laying out the animation environment.

A large part of my time was spent refining and debugging the pipeline of importing blendshape animations into UE4 from Maya. It's important to note that if you are going to do blendshapes on rigged geometry, make sure that the controllers are zeroed out before duplicating and manipulating the geometry. Any offset on a controller can create a noticeable twitch on a character in addition to the blendshape. Also, make sure that geometry is large enough in UE4 or the blendshape may break the geometry when it deforms. If you import in a skeletal structure that looks really tiny in UE4, it would be beneficial to set a scale standard in Maya, Max, etc. to correct this early on.

The following video showcases our character Esteban with a facial control rig, allowing our artists to easily animate his expressions. Along with two other characters, I setup their facial control rigs by using Maya expressions and set driven keys.

Every other week I refined and integrated new content created by our team into Unreal. This involved retopologizing and adjusting geometry to keep a consistent quality on the models and to make sure they would fit in our Dr. Seuss inspired art style. Most of the assets were laid out and arranged in Unreal by myself. This also included importing textures, creating the materials, linking the textures to the materials, and slapping the materials on the models. The environment is lit by a static directional light casting shadows and a skylight to bring up the ambient lighting. The shading underneath thick vegetative areas is further darkened by a gigantic post-process volume that contains the world. The following video showcases the final look of the environment.

My concepts for the flamingo spectators during the team's pre-production phase.

The Flamingo Swing Complete Style Guide