Indie Spotlight: Shadows of Chroma Tower

24.9.2024

INTRODUCTION

Dear Cascadeur Blog readers!

Nice to meet you! My name is Wesley Sales (@wesleysales3d), I'm 31 years old and I work as a 2D/3D generalist artist, mainly for characters, for various partners and as a freelancer. Not limited to that, I always like to explore the entire universe of digital creation, so I've worked with 2D/3D animation, with games, tried to create music, created some mobile/desktop apps with Python and Flutter, and plugins for my programs most used to help me speed up my workflow.

Today, I'm going to tell you about my persona as a 3D animator at Double Dash Studios. My experience creating some of the animations for the main character in their game: Shadows of Chroma Tower. All the challenges of animating and giving naturalness to the gameplay animations from simple animation blockouts and how Cascadeur made all this possible in a much easier way than any other program that I have already used.

ABOUT THE GAME

Shadows of Chroma Tower is a first-person dungeon crawler with roguelite elements and massive boss fights. The game is still in development by Double Dash Studios, a Brazilian game studio with several famous games in its catalog ( https://www.doubledashstudios.com ) and from time to time opens new playtest to the public (check the Discord for news : https://discord.com/invite/MqncXmVkq9 ).

If you want to stand out in this game, the journey starts by leveling up and learning new skills in a vast talent tree. As you progress, you'll have the chance to develop a profession, whether as a gatherer or a crafter, specializing in what interests you the most. Discovering new recipes and finding valuable loot will be an essential part of your adventure. Each discovery brings you closer to becoming the greatest explorer in this amazing world. Check out the game when you can, I'm sure you'll like it!

Below is the trailer for the game:

MY BIG CHALLENGE

I joined the team through a friend who works there. I had worked with him before at his old company: providing 3D consulting and creating some 3D models in Blender.

I'm not a professional animator, but with the AI tools for extracting mocap from videos and my basic knowledge of Cascadeur, I decided to put it to the test and accepted the challenge.
My mission was to take the very rough blocking animations made by the game designers and transform them into fluid and beautiful final animations, getting the feeling of weight and movement right. The Cascadeur was essential for this.

[INITIAL BLOCKING VS FINAL ANIMATION]

This was a big challenge, as I had never worked with animation for gameplay in this way before and I had to get used to it at first.
Sometimes the poses of the blocked animations were very "wrong" (but the trajectory of the weapon was already set correctly), and I needed to fix the entire body without changing the distance and movement of the weapon. The animation also needed to look fluid, even with the movement restriction on the player's head, since the camera was attached to it and could not shake too much so as not to cause nausea to the real player.

[COMPARING THE INITIAL POSE WITH MY ADJUSTED POSE]

I needed to follow the blocked animations precisely, since if I made the weapon go through another trajectory or at the wrong time, it would change the entire combat precision in the game, especially because the game is in first person and the responsiveness of movements and the attacks at cursor position are a priority for the player.

ANIMATING THE MAIN CHARACTER IN CASCADEUR

[THE PLAYER ATTACKING AN ENEMY WITH MY SWORD ANIMATIONS]

In total, I used 2 workflows until I became more familiar with Cascadeur and its tools:

1 - CREATING THE MOCAP AND CLEANING IT

I started by recreating the animations of the game designers' blockings in video so I could extract them from services such as Cascadeur's own 'Video Mocap' and the QuickMagic.ai website.

One of the animation directors, who had experience with bladed weapons, provided helpful reference videos and advice on improving the animation. It was a very iterative process with constant improvements until we reached the final animation.

The base of the mocap animation was fluid and I was able to use Cascadeur's exclusive new feature: 'Animation Unbaking', to reduce the number of keyframes and edit the mocap more easily.

[CASCADEUR'S VIDEO MOCAP WITH SOME LITTLE CLEANUP]

I needed to mirror the animation, cleanup and improve the legs motion, align the position of the character's hand/weapon and 'retiming' the mocap to better fit the original blocking speed.

Cascadeur's trajectory tools were also great for correcting weapon movement and direction, giving visual feedback on where the bone was passing in a given frame and making it easy to adjust trajectory simply by moving your gizmo.

[THE BLOCKING ANIMATION VS MY FINAL ANIMATION]

2 - CREATING THE ANIMATION FROM SCRATCH

This was the most effective and fastest way in the end.

Once I became more familiar with the tools..., directly extracting some of the base poses from the game designers' blocks, manually correcting them and using Cascadeur's AutoPhysics to give the missing fluidity and naturalness to the movement was the perfect workflow.

It was also easier to make additional edits and adjustments requested by the animation director, making iteration much faster.

[ORIGINAL KEYFRAMED ANIMATION NEXT TO AUTOPHYSICS]

[THE BLOCKING ANIMATION]

[SOME ANIMATIONS INSIDE THE UNREAL ENGINE 5]

CASCADEUR COMPATIBILITY

Cascadeur was also a very good choice in terms of compatibility with other programs, especially with Unreal Engine 5, the engine being used in the game.

It was very easy to adapt the rigs that were already being used in production to the Cascadeur rig and insert the program into the middle of the game development, even though it had never been used before by the team. Create/edit animations and export everything back to the engine was very simple too.

In Blender and Iclone, two other tools that I tested in the animation process, you usually need special settings to try to export the rig and animations correctly, but in Cascadeur it is as easy as a simple 'click' on File > Export > FBX /DAE > Animation.

[ORIGINAL RIG PREVIEW FROM BLENDER'S VIEWPORT]

Cascadeur is an incredible tool with UNIQUE features compared to any other competing program. Its AI tools are incredible and don't take away the manual control that you sometimes need as an artist. Development is very fast and it's always a pleasure for me to see and test the features of a new version.

That's all folks! This was my experience using Cascadeur in a commercial production and taking advantage of all its features to improve my workflow and deliver work with even more quality.