Project L Tech Art Team Highlight Reel for the EVO 2023 Demo Build
I joined the Project L Tech Art team in January 2021 as the first character rigging-dedicated artist. Since then I’ve had the privilege to contribute to all 4 of the EVO champs, as well as develop a facial rigging pipeline. The best part is getting to work alongside and learn from our incredible team. Jeremy Ernst has been an outstanding mentor and leader, Zhuo Huang has helped me advance my coding skills and supported us with awesome tools, Sarah Anderson and Aaron Tzeng brought much needed support and delivered incredible polish for this demo, and Jaegon Allison, Steve Zapata, and Ira Goeddel all crafted the rendering wizardry I can only begin to understand. Here’s to the road ahead, team!
The most fun I’ve had contributing to Project L since I joined the team in January 2021 was getting to develop a facial rig system and pipeline for the team. These images are pose tests from my first prototype where I translated concept expressions from our Creative Director, Mike Henry.
The final setup included tech contribution from a tech artist from Riot Central’s team, Daniel Lima. My manager Jeremy Ernst helped me learn to code for our rigging system, and our pipeline TD Zhuo Huang also helped review code and executed an amazing tool that made the final step possible. Our kickass rigging TA’s Sarah Anderson and Aaron Tzeng implemented the facial setup on Ahri and Ekko, respectively, while I finished Yasuo and Darius.
A fun challenge I got to solve was the rigging setup for Ahri’s nine tails - animators wanted all nine to be included in her rig, and my goal was to create a setup to allow easier propagation of animation as well as individual posing. The tails are all aligned to the Base tail and scaled down at Rig pose. There are parameters to scale them, spread them, control how much of the Base tail animation they inherit, and apply rotational offsets in each axis. Full individual control of each tail is preserved. This was a custom setup I scripted for her rig.
Ekko’s chain was another fun challenge for me - I wanted to create the illusion of the links appearing whole, as if from being wound up inside the canister, with unnoticeable deformation or stretching. This was another fun custom setup I scripted for his rig!