Technical Artist

Four ship types with varying sail configurations, all responding to a weather system that was new to the project. Animation had to be attractive, accurate, and clearly legible so that a player could read the sea conditions at a glance. I scoped the approach and built the brigantine first: Maya rigs, the authored animation sets, Animation Blueprint logic, and runtime physics. All of it had to stay cheap: custom LODs out of Houdini, capped bone counts and skin influence limits, and graph evaluation skipped depending on the ship's state. The rigging components went into our in-house toolset so the other ships could be built the same way. That approach carried onto the sloop, galleon and trireme.

Faces ran on an FK-only rig, which gave animators very little to work with. I built FACS rigs from custom MetaHuman bases using my own tooling, then reworked the shapes with a shape-editing tool I wrote for the studio. I prototyped the runtime approach: each head sets its joints from its own base pose animation, then plays shared pose assets on top, blended in the animation graph so heads can swap. I also set up runtime retargeting from the new rig to the old one so existing mods kept working. The rigs and the animation tech underneath them are what the game's faces still run on.

The expansion pass trailer needed two customised MetaHumans, and MetaHuman for Maya hadn't shipped, so editing them meant driving DNACalib's Python wrapper directly. I wrote the tool that sat on top of it: editing the base mesh and expressions inside the DNA file itself, then rebuilding the rig from that. I rebuilt both faces that way, fixed mesh and textures where the assets needed it, and rigged their outfits and Chaos Cloth. The cloth work carried on to the Genesis cinematics. Because the edits stayed inside Epic's format, the characters upgraded straight to the 5.6 DNA format once MetaHuman for Maya arrived.

Dreadnoughtus, dreadmare, armadoggo, megaraptor, shoulder dragons — creature rigging has been steady work across both studios. Faces too: at Counterplay I skinned the cast's face rigs, carrying one artist's FACS shapes onto the rest of the heads. One worth opening up is a monster that fired projectiles down its tongue. It had to be a squashy, stretchy spline, carry something visibly travelling its length, and retract fully into the mouth — all from leaf bone scaling and math nodes, so it survived export to engine. The spline component underneath it became Counterplay's modular spline IK.