The Stretcher-VFX

Matt Ontiveros

Tatyana Latypova

This was one of my first VFX of Mythgard.  I was kind of stumped on what to do and was searching the image for what I could use as an inspiration.  Working with card art is a VFX artist's dream in that you have a working concept to direct the vfx and visuals.  Being a noob at CCG games I watched streams of other CCG games and picked the brains of the Rhino team as to what players expect. How the pace of successful CCG games resolve timing and visuals so as not to interrupt the experience and to provide vfx that are representative of the actions and impact of a certain effect. Honestly, I struggled on what to use.  Fire, ropes, a spinning crank shaft were first attempts but didn’t seem to convey what I thought would be a compliment to the art created by Tatyana.  So, I used the one element that isn’t even on the stretcher per se.  A chain that hangs from the ceiling.  I first imagined a chain wrapping effect but that didn’t work as an impactful image.  So, I went with a whipping and pull approach with a snap.  Below is the pipeline to give you an idea of what was involved.

I used Maya and Unity (I was new to Unity) to create the VFX. Artists are extremely lucky at Rhino in that we have an engineering team that supports a robust custom tool set so we can focus on the art and not battle the engine and pipeline to get art/audio in the game.  This allows us to see our work in game rather quickly and to make iterations without having to ask for help.  That is a huge bottle neck for most studios I have worked for.

In Maya

I modeled a simple chain mesh and built a skeleton with a joint for each link. Then skinned the mesh to the skeleton and weighted it to each joint.

Then, I attached an IK spline solver to animate the chain. You animate the object moving points on the curve it creates then setting keyframes on each point.  A much nicer way to control the chain instead of forward kinematics in which I would have to animate each link in a skeleton hierarchy.

Once I got the animation roughed out I baked the animation down to the skeleton and exported the mesh, animation and skeleton out to Unity.

In Unity

Once I got the import working properly then I added it to the Fix Position and Root FX scripts that Paxton and Chris built to get vfx attached to our cards and gameboard.

This process helped me learn the Unity pipeline and set me up for future animations and vfx to be added to Mythgard.  

In game