Project Overview
Client: Zelgor Games
Objective: Bring game characters from Zelgor Games’ titles to life by leveraging Adobe Character Animator for real-time animation. This approach aimed to produce highly expressive and dynamic character sequences suitable for cutscenes, marketing materials, and social media engagement.
Scope of Work
Character Rigging and Real-Time Performance:
Rigged character elements—such as heads, eyes, mouths, and limbs—in Adobe Character Animator, enabling responsive facial expressions, lip-syncing, and hand gestures.
Integrated webcam-based tracking to capture live head positions, eye blinks, and voice input, allowing for intuitive control and naturalistic character movement during recording sessions.
Physics and Secondary Motion:
Applied built-in physics simulations to add realistic bounce and sway to props and accessories.
Enhanced Ziggy the Noob’s headband and antennae, as well as the Starfish character’s tentacles, with dynamic motion that followed the character’s movements in a smooth, organic manner.
Post-Production and Compositing:
Exported real-time performances from Character Animator into Adobe After Effects, refining the animation with color adjustments, layered effects and seamless looping sequences.
Incorporated professional audio enhancements in Adobe Audition, ensuring crisp, synchronized soundscapes that elevated the final animation’s overall impact.
Tools and Technologies:
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop: For initial character design, asset preparation, and creating high-resolution vector and raster elements.
Adobe Character Animator: For real-time puppeteering, animation recording and physics simulations.
Adobe After Effects and Audition: For compositing, visual enhancements, audio adjustments and final output preparation.
Additional Plugins: Utilized select third-party plugins to achieve specialized visual effects and streamline the workflow.
Outcome
By integrating real-time performance capture, physics-based animation, and professional post-production techniques, Zelgor Games gained a flexible and efficient pipeline for producing engaging character animations. The end results were dynamic, on-brand video sequences that enriched the game’s storytelling, improved player engagement, and supported the broader marketing strategy.
By integrating real-time performance capture, physics-based animation, and professional post-production techniques, Zelgor Games gained a flexible and efficient pipeline for producing engaging character animations. The end results were dynamic, on-brand video sequences that enriched the game’s storytelling, improved player engagement, and supported the broader marketing strategy.
Preliminary real-time 2D animation test of the character Ziggy from the game Noobs in Space - looping animated .gif file.
Real-time 2D animation of the Starfish character from Noobs in Space - Sequence created using web cam to track head, eyes and mouth. Real-time voice recording adjusted with synthesis plugins in Adobe Audition.
3D rendering (still image) of The Starfish created for social media marketing.
