Character Art & MoCap Pipeline

SITUATION & TASK

Developed to master both character poly-modeling and complex technical animation pipelines. The challenge spanned from poly-modeling characters from scratch to managing production-ready narrative pipelines—integrating advanced digital character systems with real-world motion capture data.

ROLE & SYSTEM

Character & Technical Artist. Modeled and textured stylized meshes, managed character integration pipelines from Character Creator (CC) to Autodesk Maya, and executed motion capture retargeting utilizing Rokoko system hierarchies.

TECH STACK

Autodesk Maya, Character Creator (CC), Rokoko Smartsuit Studio, Python Scripting, Maya API, ARKit 52 Blendshapes, Keyframe Baking, Custom Tooling Pipeline.

PROJECT INFO

Context: Character Studies & Production Pipelines (Ocean of Memories).

Pipelines: MoCap Retargeting, CC Integration, Polygonal Modeling, Custom Tools.

Character Modeling

Focused on mastering polygonal character modeling inside Autodesk Maya, prioritizing clean sub-D topology, sharp profiles, and expressive proportions. This showcase features a high-fidelity Baby Groot character model built entirely through structural poly-modeling and extrusion workflows. The project served as a foundational study in translating detailed concept art into optimized, clean mesh hierarchies suitable for production.

Realistic digital Human Pipelines

Utilized industry-standard character platforms like Character Creator (CC) to deploy fully rigged, production-ready human actors. The technical task focused on cross-platform data pipeline management—exporting complex mesh hierarchies, baked materials, and native skeletal rigs from CC, and successfully importing them into Maya while maintaining high-fidelity material lookdev.

Custom AI-Assisted Maya Automation Tools

MoCap Animation & Custom Tooling

To streamline the MoCap retargeting pipeline for Ocean of Memories, I engineered two distinct Python tools for Maya to resolve integration mismatches between Character Creator (CC) and Rokoko. The first tool automates facial animation setup by instantly batch-renaming CC blendshapes to match the Rokoko ARKit 52 standard upon object selection. The second tool solves structural animation translation issues; it programmatically links blendshape values to the lower_jaw and eye joints to fix static pupil and jaw animations, allowing manual numeric calibration before baking the final engine-ready keyframes.