With the rig issues finally resolved, I was able to move on to the penultimate stage of the project – animation. I recorded references for each shot and animated them one by one. Alongside the animation work, I made minor camera adjustments and began creating polished versions of the particle effects that had been tested earlier.
Referencing and Animating
I recorded several movement references at once and used them throughout the week while animating. The workflow became much smoother at this stage: I would animate a shot in Blender, export it, and bring it directly into the existing sequence inside Unreal Engine. This let me immediately see which areas needed more cleanup based on the final camera angle.
The cel shading effect also helped during this phase. Many tiny animation imperfections were naturally hidden by the stylised look, so I focused my time on correcting only the poses and movements that were most visible to the camera.
A timelapse of the animation process would probably explain this better than any written description, but essentially it was a cycle of referencing, blocking, refining, exporting, reviewing, and repeating.
Once most of the key poses were established, I cleaned up the arcs and graph curves for each animation to make the movements smoother and more consistent. After receiving tutor feedback, I also fixed a few posing errors and relaxed joints that looked stiff or unnatural in the rendered shots.
Rigging a crow
For the opening shot, I initially wanted to include a crow perched on a structure to add a darker, dystopian atmosphere. I took a short break from the main character animation to rig a crow model using Rigify in Blender.
It was a fun experiment and worked quite well, but due to time constraints I wasn’t able to animate the bird, so I eventually removed it from the scene.
Animating Rope
The rope animation turned out to be surprisingly challenging, as I hadn’t attempted something like this before. I created a custom rope rig using a combination of modifiers and constraints.
The setup worked by using a single rope module that was arrayed along a curve. The curve itself was connected to seven circular control empties, which allowed me to control both the movement of the rope and its overall length.
To integrate the rope with the character:
- I parented three middle controllers to the character’s hands and torso.
- The top two controllers allowed me to keep the rope visibly taut.
- The bottom two controllers added a natural sway to the rope as the character descended.
Although it took several tests to get right, the final setup allowed the rope to follow the character’s movements in a believable way. Then I used .usd format to export it to Unreal engine which worked perfectly in sequencer as a geometry cache.