TOKYO GHOUL DEMO

Project Overview

This Tokyo Ghoul Demo Project is a year long project focused on creating a fully playable boss fight demo/vertical slice from the TG IP. The focus of the project is mainly to nail understanding the technical animation pipeline, but also to understand the rest of the pipelines necessary to complete this demo.

The fight scene specifically is the final fight between the characters Kishou Arima and Ken Kaneki. The scene occurs in chapter 83 of the Tokyo Ghoul Re: manga and season 4 episode 2 of the anime. It's a duel to the death between father and son

Update Four 5.5 months in
April 10th - April 24th

The focus of this update was VFX and lighting polish. Avery helped with the lighting pass, as Unreal 5.1 update changed how lumen is rendered and it distorted the scene. What was done in this sprint was lighting fix, new fog, new wind vfx, dynamic terrain change, and vfx for the dynamic terrain change.

Update Three 5 months in
February 1st - March 3rd

The focus of this update was VFX and more shader work. In the video I also talk about VFX I did around month 3 but was saving to talk about in this video with further implementation. I will aim to complete more VFX in another update

VFX batch 1

This update an interactive tentacle VFX was made to match the ghoul Kagunes. One slash VFX was added to the character animations. And an enemy lock on indicator was added.

Fade Shader on Procedural Mesh

I think the biggest thing this update is this fade shader. Basically after each cut of the pillar, a timer starts on the applied material instance and the shader goes from glowing red hot to a cool down black. I learned the most about blueprinting on this section so far. Kayle Heideman helped me finish and understand this.

Update Two 4 months in
January 3rd - February 1st

The focus of this update was two things, finishing the procedural mesh slicing from the end of month 3 and working on shaders.

Procedural Mesh Slice

It took about 1.5 months but it's working. The goal was to create real time procedural mesh slicing based on where the sword slice starts and ends. A dude from Israel (on the unreal slackers discord server) helped me figure out the linear algebra and Avery Byers helped me finish optimizing the mesh in engine and creating the molten shader in between slices.

Manga (Shaders)

I created 3 shaders. One shader that updates in real time on each object the blueprints are attached to and 2 post process shaders. based on the tutorial links in the video description. I used the in-material shader for cross hatching in the shadows and then mixed the 2 post process together using the stencil and applied to specific areas of the scene.

Update One 3 months in
August 23rd - November 20th

The focus of this update was two things, environment and technical animation work.

The video shows the overall progress for the update. Below is the breakdown of the work and pipelines I had dived into.

Environment

The environment was split into two focuses: adaptation between the manga and anime version and interactive foliage.

Adaptation

Properly adapting somewhere in between the manga and anime was an iterative feat that took roughly 12 weeks. The biggest hurdle was creating lighting for the scene, that was as faithful as it could be to the refs. In the end the roof was removed and the walls were faded to create the necessary composition.

Interactive foliage

The interactive foliage was very difficult to find an efficient pipeline for. In the end I found an industry standard pipeline(which is essentially nowhere online) and pieced it together. The process is a form of rigging without bones that is highly optimized where I have 400K plant instances running at ~65-75 FPS.

Click for PDF

Technical Animation

The technical animation was split into two focuses: player character blueprinting and AI character blueprinting.

After a lot of searching to understand this pipeline I found an amzing tutorial that breaks down one way to go about the pipeline by Eric Xu Cui on a Mandarin Skillshare site called Wingfox. https://www.wingfox.com/c/8686

This video series breaks down when to use in-place vs root motion animations, proper usage of montages and notify states, blendspaces and state machines, AI black boards, and AI trees.

Player Character BP

The video shows the basic breakdown of what I learned from the Wingfox video. Which includes blendspaces, montages, etc.

AI Character BP

The video shows the basic breakdown of what I learned from the Wingfox video. Which includes tools from the player character, blackboards, etc.

Tokyo Ghoul Demo