Dev Blog 9: Character Rigs and Animations

Character Creation

Written By: Blake Bissell and Kenley

The original idea for our characters was inspired by “Everybodies Gone to The Rapture”.

We wanted to create some sort of androginous character so that people could connect better with our character. In order to achieve this we wanted to make a particle based character. While exploring the particle systems within Unity we found that the standard particle system did have a way to connect with a Mesh but it was not giving us the control we wanted over the particles themselves. This led us to upgrade the entire project to the Universal Rendering Pipeline(URP) in order to utilize Unity’s VFX graphs to create the character’s particle system.

Technical Process:

On the technical side of the character we made use of an example project the Unity developers created for their short film “The Heretic”. In the end of this short film they utilize VFX graphs to create a massive particle character, we took a lot of their code from this project to allow VFX graphs to follow a mesh renderer which VFX graphs cannot do natively yet. This code essentially takes a picture of the character mesh in an early rendering pass to calculate the UV’s for the character model which allows us to place the particles directly on the characters mesh outline. This process is done every frame as well to allow for the particles to follow the character even through animations. Now that we could get particles to spawn on the characters mesh outline we just apply a null shader to the mesh so we cannot see it and will only see the outline of particles.

In terms of the actual particle movement and spawning we utilized VFX graphs and manually controlled each particle from there giving it size, position, and color adjustments every frame to get a random movement look out of a totally controlled system.

After the particles are created we import the rig and animations made by Mo Morris. Once imported we hook the animations to the rig using an animation controller. Once in the animation controller we can set how the animations should play, we can set that when not moving to loop the idle animation and the opposite for walking. With this hooked up we can attach the particle system to the rig and change to a null material. With that we see our particle based character able to walk and idle.