Katelina Locke // UE5 Character
I created this character for a personal game project of mine entitled, Death and Sorcery. Katelina Locke is an accomplished rogue who lets nothing get in the way of her goals. She will play the foil to the stoic and stand-up main character, Lotus.
My goal with this piece was to learn to merge the metahuman head rig with the 3rd person mannequin body rig in Unreal Engine so I could make use of gameplay animation assets but support live link facial animation via the iPhone for ease of use with cinematic Sequences.
The body motion is a mix of Mannequin and retargeted Mixamo animations, using a branch of the UE5 3rd Person AnimBP.
Facial idle animations were captured via the ARKit workflow on my iPhone 15. I tried to keep the acting super simple in this!
All elements sculpted in Zbrush
Textured in Substance Painter
Skin Weighting in Maya
Hair Groom in Xgen (Maya)
Unreal 5.3, raytraced, Lumen
In order to put my animBP work to the test I needed to put together a simple sequence where I could blend performance animations from mixamo and live link with blueprint(gameplay) animations to create story moments.
It's a simple graph but it took some time to land on this setup. It's important to place the Default slot node just before the layered blend node so that your live link captures respect the body movement during sequencing.
The Sculpt in Zbrush with placeholder hair
Here are some material captures from different environments.
I absolutely love working on nanite models. That pipeline is so liberating. Here are the nanite meshes I sculpted and textured for the simple cinematic above :)
