Recursion

30 Apr 2017 #Project #Animation

Recursion is a sci-fi horror short film built in the Unity game engine.

The film follows a lone spaceman who, after a sudden crash landing, arrives in a dark dimension of endless barren grassland. With resources scarce, the spaceman ventures forth, slowly discovering that he is no longer alone in this world.

This project was built as my senior degree project at Massart. I worked on the majority of the assets including the programming, modelling, animation, and rigging. I worked with a sound designer for the score and an SFX artist for the foley. Additionally I worked with a UI artist to built the space helmet HUD. It took about 9 months to complete, and the film was screened at the animation departmental show at the Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2016.

Modelling

The low-poly modelling for the film was all done in Maya. A hi-poly version was created as well and baked on as a normal map.

Texturing

The texturing was done mostly in Quixel, using four maps, an Albedo, Metallic, Ambient Occlusion and Normal Map.

Rigging

A custom rig was built for the character in maya, featuring fully IK/FK arms and legs, an IK head and a spline IK spine.

Animation

The custom rig was used for both first person and third person animation. The animating was baked and then imported into unity.

Effects

The film included several particle effects built using the Unity Shuriken particle editor:

The fire was created with a hand painted image sequence 

The fire effect was later modified for the crashing ship

The Demo

In addition to the film, a playable demo was also created. It uses the same assets but allows the player to explore the world of the film as a procedurally generated landscape.