Voodoo Child — Portfolio

During a year, we decided, with a few other people, to create video game prototype. We tried to respect two themes: it had to be a platformer and it had to be in cartoon style.
For the game's story and the type of game, Voodoo Child is a side-scrolling 3D platformer which story takes place at the beginning of 1960s near New Orleans.
The player has the control of Janis, a 12-year-old girl who, helped by a voodoo doll and by powers entrusted by the Voodoo Pantheon, is going to have the difficult task to get back a old artefact.

3D Modeling

The first point is about the modelling. As for the other members of the team, I worked on the modelling of several props: the creation of the mesh, the creation of UVs as well as the creation of textures. To do it, we used Maya and Substance Painter.

But my main model was the voodoo puppet, the second playable character.

Animations

The second part is about the animations. All the animations as well as the rigs were realized with Maya.

We used a double skeleton system, one that we called the BLEND which would serve for the skin of the object, and the second was called IK and which would serve to make all the constraints which we would put on it. We also added controllers bound to the IK skeleton to have a better control over the animation and finally, we bound the BLEND and IK, so that we can act on the BLEND with the controllers. And from there, we have skinned the character whom we could afterward animate.

Besides the doll, I also took care of other characters as well as of other simple objects as for example a snake, a chain or a liana.

Here some of the animations I have done:
- an animation where the voodoo puppet dives into the ground to retrieve the zombie
- an animation where the puppet come out of Janis' hair, which was a bit complicated because I had to animated both characters at the same time and it had to be perfectly timed
- an animation where Janis walked on a rope-like snake

An another task I did was to verify the transitions between animations. To do that, I used one of Maya's tools called the Trax Editor.

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Programmation

Just like CARUS, my contribution to the programming limited itself to the creation of the game interfaces: the main menu interface, the pause menu, and the dialogues one.

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Team Members

Maryne Bardinal: Character Designer
Baptiste Bérard: Props Artist
Lucile Gome : Lighting Artist and Environment Artist
Johanne Koffi: Artiste 3D
Damien Lecoq: Lead Project Manager and Environment Artist
Thomas Pouget: Game Designer, Level Designer, Rigger
Rémi Cham: Programmer

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