COSC 3P98 Final Animation

Animation Software

Blender was the primary tool we utilized for this assignment. Thankfully, it has a large host of add-ons specifically designed for using Minecraft models. As programmers who had been in the GAME Program, we are familiar with the process of animating as we have had to work alongside designers to implement animations into our games. Each model has bones assigned to them, these bones allow us to set a model into a specific pose, and then set a keyframe of it. Keyframes hold information on what position a model's skeleton should be in at any given time. When you transition between keyframes, Blender will automatically interpolate between the positioning of those bones, allowing the model to mimic smooth motion

MCPrep

MCPrep is an add-on that allows you to import Minecraft character models, item models, and textures for those models into Blender. The models come with rigs already attached, which helped alleviate a ton of initial prep for this project, and allows you to get straight into animation with the characters.

Character Skins

Because character models have their UV maps wrapped the same way as they are in Minecraft, any player skin you can use in Minecraft, can be applied the same way to the models used from MCPrep. Dante and Vergil are both very popular characters, so because of this, there are tons of free skins created for the both of them that other players have uploaded onto the internet. 

"NovaSkin" and "The Skindex" are both two very good free Minecraft skin-sources to find Minecraft skins on, and we were able to locate a decent skin of both Vergil and Dante one the both of them.

Mineways

Mineways is the other tool we utilized for this assignment. It allows you to import a Minecraft world, and export a small chunk of it into a workable model for Blender. This allowed us to very quickly locate an area in-game that resembled the cutscene area, and export it into a model we could use.

Strategies - Video Plane

Because we are recreating a cutscene with different models, the upside to that was that we already had an entire animation to use as reference. Blender has a very useful feature that allows you to import a video as a plane. This allowed us to constantly have an image pulled up in engine that allowed us to quickly set up poses to, and that image would update with each keyframe, which really simplified the process.

Strategies - Splitting Up The Work

For this assignment, we split the workload. One of us handled animating Dante and generating the environment, and the other handled animating Vergil in his chair. At the end of it, we exported the chair half as an FBX, then imported it into the other half of the project to join them together.

Particles

MCPrep comes with built in particles, which made adding them very easy to do. The original cutscene we based this off doesn't use too many, but the few particle effects we needed to recreate for the project were achievable with the base prefabs, and they allowed us to simulate movement of them easily as each particle stays attached to a parent transform that we can move.

Adobe After Effects

After exporting the project, we edited everything together using After Effects. This mainly comprised of splicing everything together and overlaying the original audio-track on top of it all, then slightly adjusting framerate to accommodate for any discrepancies between visual and audio.

References

Sound Effect & Voice Lines: Devil May Cry 5 cutscene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4_1tzj47iI

Minecraft Map To 3D Model: https://www.realtimerendering.com/erich/minecraft/public/mineways/

MCprep Blender Addon: https://theduckcow.com/dev/blender/mcprep/

Dante Skin: https://www.minecraftskins.com/skin/21311207/dante-dvm/

Vergil Skin: https://minecraft.novaskin.me/skin/6175813052/Vergil-DMC5

Minecraft Animation Tutorial Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62fVXVAO13A&list=PL8X_CzUEVBfaa9PD9lWm4HdQCxUhl62Zb

Object Appear/Disappear Technique: https://youtu.be/TAkwCM8s8DM