Chandler Jeffcoat
ALTO
Alto is a startup game by CKC Medical LLC. aimed to improve patients' treatment while on their nebulizer. The game utilizes CKC's unique nebulizer controller that turns breathing into a mechanic in the game. The below link is access to the steam page.
Update (August 2022): It looks like the project is cancelled, no further updates unless otherwise notified. No steam release.
Mitchell Walker designed, modeled, & textured Alto
https://www.artstation.com/d_i_v_i_n_e
My role on this project was being a technical artist. The team consisted of me, Mitchell (artist), Nate (producer), and Devyn (programmer). I rigged and animated the character, made some vfx, made the steam assets, and split the environment art with Mitchell. For the purposes of this portfolio I will go over the rigging and animation only.
Rigging
The focus of the rig was to help make the character (Alto) as kid friendly as possible. That included creating a set of facial blendshapes that made sense but still looked cute. The overall rig utilizes a shape key for the facial blendshapes, has an IKFK switch for the arms, and seperate independant rig for the chest deformer.
The shape key has a left/right eye, left/right smile, and blowing/sucking. The legs only had FK ctrls as Alto would be sitting down the entire time. As for the chest, it has a seperate rig to accommodate for Unity's non-uniform scaling limitation. The chest joint was duplicated and any joints above were deleted and a scaling contraint was added to the control. The 3rd gif shows the chest deformation and facial deformation .
Facial Blendshapes
Overall Rig
Showing chest and face deformation
Animation
As we were a small team trying to complete an indepth demo, there was only so much we could risk on programming stuff we had little experience in. So Devyn and I implemented an 8 direction movement, with 8 baked out animations, making it look as physics based as possible.
The sucking/blowing animation worked with the breathing controller that worked in tandem with the regular gamepad controller. As you breathe into the nebulizer sucking would play, and when you breathe out blowing would play.
Sucking
Movement
Breathing Controller
Blowing
Wand
In different stages of the sandbox/generasl levels you could pick up different items that would require the use of blowing and sucking into the nebulizer. The goal of using different items like the wand or blowdart was to time out nebulizer intake (the medication inhalant) was to distract the player from the fact they are in treatment.
The remaining animations like additional idles and the victory dance were to add flavor/or additional likeability to the character
Blowdart
Idle 1+2
Idle 1+3
Victory Dance
