Animating a Fan Concept of Charles Xavier with a Marvel Rivals-Style

Introduction

Ethan: My name is Ethan Du Toit. I've been a CG enjoyer for about 16 years, 6 of which were as a professional. Since I was about 9 years old, I've been messing around with Blender and gradually building up knowledge, teaching myself until I was satisfied with my proficiency. Over time, I've worked on small indie projects such as Seekers of Skyveil and Project Ghost, both of which were sadly cancelled, but now I find myself actively working with Riot Games on 2XKO.

Charles: My name is Charles Icay, and I've been working in the animation industry for over 15 years. I studied at an art college formerly known as the Art Institute of Vancouver. Some of the more notable projects I've contributed to include Overwatch 2, Luigi's Mansion 3, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and Injustice 2.

Charles Xavier MVP

Ethan: Whenever I'm not actively working, I'm always solving some problem or satisfying some curiosity. In this case, I really wanted to try my hand at lighting in the Marvel Rivals style, as it's not something I'd ever attempted before. Throughout the process, I ended up finding many cool tricks and features I wasn't aware Blender even had, despite 16 years of using it. As far as references, we simply used the in-game MVPs as a reference for pacing, texturing, comp, and VFX.

Charles: I'm a huge Marvel fan and have been following Marvel Rivals closely for quite some time. Last year, I created a fan-made Marvel Rivals animation featuring Cyclops, and I wanted to revisit that world with a character who hasn't yet appeared in the game. Inspired by X-Men '97, I chose to highlight a less obvious character, one that fans would appreciate but wouldn't
typically expect to see represented.

Charles: For the character, I started with an excellent Maya rig created by Ramon Arango, which I then modified to match Charles Xavier's appearance from the X-Men animated series.

Ethan: Once the animated character was passed over to me in Blender via Alembic Caching, I set about constructing shaders and Geo-Node functionality for the shot, primarily exposing geometric properties as constants I could use in the compositing process, such as Rim Light and surface curvature. I also did a very subtle texture pass to add irregularity to the otherwise very uniform shading.

Animation

Charles: The animation process itself was fairly straightforward, as the move was intentionally simple. I drew inspiration from the X-Men films and animated shows, tailoring certain shots to feel familiar and recognizable to longtime fans. Once the animation was ready, I handed it off to Ethan, and we collaborated closely to refine the final look.

Ethan: Once the animated meshes were sent over, I had to retime the overall Cache to match my timeline, as the transfer underwent some sort of time dilation (The entire sequence somehow got condensed into 14 frames), but luckily still had all of the now sub-frame data preserved.

Now that this was successfully moved from Maya to Blender, I could start keyframing the non-character elements, such as the shader properties, the camera, and the compositing layers.

Ethan: After the initial sound blockout provided by Charles for his demo render, I used that as a base to further push it to match the usual pacing of the Rivals MVP screens. The entire soundscape is primarily music-based, as the action within the scene doesn't justify much foley, and given the telepathic nature of the Professor, it felt best to remove all real-world sounds entirely.

For the VFX, I primarily used my own shader assets as well as Textures I have in my library, designed by Hun Young Ha and SrRafles, who are both excellent real-time VFX Artists specializing in 2D flipbooks. After constructing the shader and outputting it as an AOV (which allows any shading step to be used as a render layer), I created meshes with curated UVs to move my textures along. This is standard VFX practice and is the foundation of a good 99% of FX in games.

Conclusion

Ethan: To achieve the final look, I separated every element into its own render layer and composed them all individually to match the properties seen in Rivals, such as chromatic aberration only on the rim light. After this, I recomposed the entire image.

All VFX and motion graphics were done either in scene or in comp and were all manually keyed. No simulation was used. Overal this project took about 9 hours combined over 3 weeks to complete (Not including rendering/file transfers, etc)

Charles: The main challenge was maintaining visual consistency with the Marvel Rivals style. I really enjoyed collaborating with Ethan, experimenting, iterating, and ultimately landing on a final look that we were both happy with.

Ethan: I very much enjoyed the process of reverse-engineering the Rivals' look. It may not be the same methods they use since this wasn't in Unreal, but it certainly serves as proof-of-concept for hobbyists and CG enjoyers.

Ethan Du Toit, VFX Artist

Charles Icay, Animator

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford