Animated Save Station Book for Chai Games

I am currently working on a set of save station assets for Chai Games and their upcoming TPS horror game. This asset was quite simple in terms of modelling and texturing, I really wanted to show a level of decay in line with the enemies of the game, implying the books were left by someone else who may or may not have made it out alive. This was however my first time animating a set of vertex on a pair of curves, this did take me some time to master fluidly, as well as learning how to export as an alembic file with all of the right settings so that the mesh could be imported as a geometry cache file into ue4 and retain it's vertex animation data. Following this, I spent a while trying to create a smoothly animated shader that would play my drawing animation, designed to potentially be updated with a biro sketch of each level's intended boss. I eventually found I was able to create a GIF for my base colour and import it into ue4 using a plugin.

Going forward I may have to consider an image sequence import instead of the GIF so that the drawing animation can be triggered at the time of player interaction and the page-turning, this will be tested between myself and the developer in the coming days.

I now intend to create a small interior shed scene to be the first save location with uniquely textured tables so that this book asset can be featured anywhere in the game.

I was responsible for this piece's idea generation and full modelling pipeline process, including shader creation. The final in-game texture animation has since been created by Dev chai Games using an image sequence.