Position
Blended motion capture and asset motion, implemented animations with interactions, created smoke/sparks effects and made parameters to allow fine tuning for artists, created shaders for river and waterfall and developed a system to convert the joints of avatars used by VR users.
Effects
I created sparks and smoke effect that is symbolic of Chimney Town with VFXGraph.
In creating the smoke, I first focused on the principle of how smoke is generated in this town and what role it plays in the original story.
In the original story, smoke is a symbol of something that blocks dreams, but it is also a part of the beautiful scenery. The texture used was not graphite-like black smoke, but rather a slightly grayish smoke with a sense of outline and volume, based on the warmth of the smoke with a faint light around the chimney cap.
For lighting artist, I implemented the parameters externally to allow for fine adjustment of color and volume.
Animations
The animation was originally planned to use the motion capture data that had been performed by the actors. However, there were significant changes to the content after recording mocap, so I created a series of animations by creatting new animations and combining asset motion data and mocap data in Unity.
In pursuit of natural animation, I was conscious of the joint structure and the emotions that led to the actions.
I also used timeline to implement an interaction in which user waves characters, the characters waves at the user back, while playing back a predetermined animation based on the storyline.
Avator
I implemented avatar, which is the "appearance in the VR space" of the person play the VR. Specifically, I modeled the cape that would become the torso, set up to it real-time physics processing, and implemented a mechanism to control the neck joints when they exceed a certain value in order to avoid unnaturalness. I made adjustments comparing textures and colors in areas that are easily affected by lighting and areas that are less easily affected by lighting.
Shaders
When expressing the flowing motion of rivers and waterfalls, some of the dynamic scenery is implemented with dynamic shaders instead of mesh animation to reduce the CPU load. Since this Unity project had a built-in render pipeline, Amplify Shader Editor was used instead of VFXGraph.
