On the last term, I joined Karl and Yann’s Cthulhu project, we have decided to continue with it on this summer. My job is to re-design the storyboard and then using Yann’s character and Karl’s scene to create the animation for the first few shots.

Because of the whole project is has been wroking on Unreal engine, I will use a Maya plug-in called Livelink in order to do the animation and view it in Unreal engine at the same time.

First turn the Livelink UI on, add the root skeleton and camera.

Link them in Unreal engine.

Create an Animation Blueprint, add a node ‘Livelink Pose’ into the blueprint, select ‘Root_M’ and link it to the output pose, give the Maya’s Skeletal animation data to the character on the scene.

Select the camera and give it a component ‘Livelink controller’, means import the data of Maya’s camera to the camera in Unreal engine.

On the Cinematics section, open the Level blueprint and add two nodes: ‘get player controller’ and ‘set view target with blend’, then import the camera into the blueprint. ‘Set view target blend’ is a function node, its function is to change the attribute of a module to another one. Therefore, I’m going to change the view of the player to the camera that I created.

After this, if I hit ‘Play’ in Unreal, and move the camera in Maya, the camera in Unreal will move the same way synchronously. So I can watch the scene in Uneral, and make the animation in Maya at the same time. The next step, it’s to make the animation.