UNREAL ENGINE PIPELINE

I had the oppurtunity to lead a small team of four in the development of a 2D fighting game in Unreal Engine 4. During that time, I developed many pipelines and templates to connect my artists and programmers.

To assist the creation of animations, I synthesized and broke down the important animations needed for every character.

I also created an animation workflow and templates for my artists to follow. To do this I created templates for animation frames to keep consistant proportions and perspective. I determined that 2048x2048 was the optimum size for sprites to retain quality while keeping file size low.
Note: The background image used for screen size reference is not created by me, it is from the game: 'Guilty Gear XRD Rev2'

These templates were created through extensive research in the strategies of other fighting games. Images taken from: Street fighter 3rd strike, Under Night In Birth, Skullgirls, King of Fighters and Blazblue

The workflow conisted of roughing the animation keys in the template files, then painting tones directly in black and white for inbetweens and keys, and finally outlining the edge for each frame. We would then export each unique frame as a TGA file. The images were then proccessed into Unreal engine 'flipbooks' for runtime. Frames that ran for more than one FPS frame had timing manually changed in engine to prevent the creation of multiple duplicate frames in storage. The programs used included: Photoshop, Clipstudio and Krita.

I also taught my artists to use a color pallete system and non-antiailising workflow.

The pallete system worked bymapping the specific pixel of shade on one black and white reference pallete to the coloredpixel on the colored reference pallete with the same x value. Using this map, it would replace anyshade in the material with that specific value to the mapped color. A demonstration can be viewed below.The method was mainly derived froma forum post

In order to keep a consistant style, I created reference sheets to draw from.