RGCA - Assassin's Creed Fan Fiction Game Trailer
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Ever since the first Assassin's Creed was launched in 2007, I've been a fan of the series. I've always thought about making a fan fiction cinematic trailer of my own for it just for fun. This contest gives me the perfect opportunity to finally take a shot. I'll be producing the animation action shots and scenes in iclone. I'll document the workflow here.
My protagonist for the trailer will be the Altair character from the Assassin's Creed video game itself (property of Ubisoft & Assassin's Creed franchise).
**If anyone new to using the iclone pipeline for character animation, wants more details of any of these steps or tools, feel free to reach out and I'll answer whatever questions I can
First order of business was getting the mesh extracted and rigged up. I used to use blender for creating rigs but have started using Reallusion's ready made game character rig and adapting it in Maya to fit to any meshes I need to rig. It greatly increases the speed of the process.
Next was to get the character into iclone which is easy with 3dxchange for any .obj, .fbx or .3ds files
3dxchange also allows for setting facial bones for facial puppeteering and viseme settings for lipsyncing with audio.
Now, we're set in iclone for realtime animation and rendering with our fully rigged game character on our stage.
Last step for our character is to apply the soft cloth physics in iclone to our Altair robe mesh so we can get natural movement of it while animating
And finally, here's a render using the INDIGO RT render plugin out of iclone
Over the next few weeks, I'll update this thread with additional asset and scene development for the trailer itself.
My protagonist for the trailer will be the Altair character from the Assassin's Creed video game itself (property of Ubisoft & Assassin's Creed franchise).
**If anyone new to using the iclone pipeline for character animation, wants more details of any of these steps or tools, feel free to reach out and I'll answer whatever questions I can
First order of business was getting the mesh extracted and rigged up. I used to use blender for creating rigs but have started using Reallusion's ready made game character rig and adapting it in Maya to fit to any meshes I need to rig. It greatly increases the speed of the process.
Next was to get the character into iclone which is easy with 3dxchange for any .obj, .fbx or .3ds files
3dxchange also allows for setting facial bones for facial puppeteering and viseme settings for lipsyncing with audio.
Now, we're set in iclone for realtime animation and rendering with our fully rigged game character on our stage.
Last step for our character is to apply the soft cloth physics in iclone to our Altair robe mesh so we can get natural movement of it while animating
And finally, here's a render using the INDIGO RT render plugin out of iclone
Over the next few weeks, I'll update this thread with additional asset and scene development for the trailer itself.
Replies
Is there a tutorial?
Hi Onizuka. There are lots of video tutorials on YouTube on how to use 3D Ripper DX which is compatible with the Assassin's Creed PC version of the game to extract the models. That's how I first learned how to mod game items for fun.
Undoubtedly. Fortunately still have a month. Although with some well placed soft cloth physics, wind and dust effects, shouldn't be too crazy to make the set it self come to life.
Biggest time sink will be putting together era appropriate background characters and extras to fill out some of the scenes. I'll tackle that one bit at a time though.
Hey Wolfzone, loving your work!!...
Just a few quick questions please;
* Do you know of any tutorials that demonstrate this process of boning an un-boned humanoid in Maya using the game character rig where we can watch and follow the process, click-by-click and step by step in real time? I've had the resource kit for a year, but the only tutorial I can find is only 4 minutes long, moves too fast and skips many steps in Maya, (which is new to me too) so I've only been able to re-map bones that already come with a boned character.
...and those building kits look fabulous in your set!!!...
Could you please tell us:
* What kits are they?
* How do you manage to have so many assets without slowing down your system too much?
* And what graphics card are you using?
... with many thanks for your inspiration already!
Hi Bleetz,
There was no one single step by step tutorial for the rigging process that I've seen. I learned a lot by trial and error as I am self taught with most of these items. I watched general maya rigging tutorials like this one when I was getting started:
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That being said, if I have some time this week I'll look at making one of my own for you as it might be informative to others as well.
The content packs can be found here: Desert Oasis by Dexsoft: http://www.reallusion.com/ContentStore/iClone/pack/Dexsoft_Oasis/default.aspx
The Medieval Village by reallusion: http://www.reallusion.com/ContentStore/csproduct.aspx?contentid=AIC310DIENU050120081204001
And the Middle East World Builder by Arteria 3D: http://www.reallusion.com/ContentStore/ccdproduct.aspx?contentid=AIC430CIENU050120111104001
As for my system, I run iclone on an Alienware Laptop so it takes a fair bit before my system will slow down as it runs fairly well. The specs are below:
Intel Core i7-4700MQ 2.40 Ghz, 16GB of RAM, with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M with 2GB of VRAM.
Hahaha. Ask and you shall receive. Animation Test 1 of Altair character (Character is the property of Ubisoft and the Assassin's Creed Franchise). Character rigged and converted to a non-standard character for use in realtime in iclone. Rendered using IndigoRT iclone plugin
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Many MANY Thanks for that very helpful reply... a tutorial on that subject would certainly fill an empty niche and help a lot of people!
But your comments are also very insightful, because the size of your set looks quite similar to one of my others projects, where I'm running iClone5 on an Intel i7-4770CPU @ 3.4Ghz with 32 GB RAM and AMD Radeon HD7800 Series graphics card... and the darn thing bogs down whenever my projects exceed 5000 frames and/or 10 million polys, or if I try to open anything in iC6... and yet it can handle up to 5 much bigger projects running simultaneously in larger programs like Cinema4D, which now makes me suspect that my graphics card may not be as universally useful as I'd been led to believe... especially now that I can see similar sized projects like yours working so well that they're mindblowing...
So many thanks again!
Very greatly appreciated!
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Holy... Freakin... WOW!...
Did you use any particle effects or DOF settings to help blend foreground to background?
Thanks guys.
No DOF was used for this shot. I mostly matched the buildings to the background with manipulation of the saturation levels on the materials and then played with the visual settings to get the right overall look.
Here's some images of the set itself that went into that shot. When you look behind the curtain so to speak you can see how well you can use iclone to trick the eye and establish some grandiose shots with some creative combination and prop positioning
Niiice... and a really cool image layer.... gotta love those new setting features in iC6 - I haven't mastered them yet myself, but seeing examples like this with settings really helps, so those extra pics are very greatly appreciated...
Do you mind if I also ask re the image layer; do you animate the diffuse map in the image layer as well, keep it pinned to the cam or load it in as a wall for manual relocation to suit your angles..?
There's no image layers in the shot. The front plane is a video plane with an alpha channel for the flying birds. It's just positioned in fron of the camera in the appropriate location so that as the camera pans, the flock of birds appear to fly out over the wall. That is just a separate video file applied to the plane.