The Blender Workflow Behind a Dancing Animation of Arcane's Jinx

Introduction

Hi! I'm Ave Espelita (Anton Victor Espelita), Lead Animator at Ubisoft Philippines. I've worked on Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Skull and Bones. I started creating 3D animations back when I was in high school, around 14 years ago. At the time, there weren't many schools that provided 3D animation as a course, so I ended up dropping out of college and self-studying on YouTube.

My first big break was when a Team Fortress 2 fan-made video I created went viral, and Machinima offered me a contract to become a content creator. There, I made several videos related to Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, Assassin's Creed 3, and several other games.

Who would have thought that a few years later, I'd be working on an actual Assassin's Creed game like Valhalla with Ubisoft?! 

A recent project I'm quite proud of would be my collaboration with a Character Artist, Operus de los Reyes, an animation tribute to The Legend of Zelda, which you can find here!

Jinx Animation Project

It was a mundane night of just scrolling through Instagram when I saw a reel of Julia K Barni dancing to the tune of Rasputin. Once I saw that, I sent it as an email to myself saying in all caps, "ANIMATE THIS!". From there, it was just a matter of observing how she moved, doing my best to give justice to her dance skills, and adding Jinx's personality.

Modeling and Texturing

The character model was done by Iona Dolidze and you can find it here. The rig was in Maya, but I prefer animating in MotionBuilder, so I purchased the rig. I made adjustments to the FBX in Blender to use it in MotionBuilder and animated the main body there. The hair was done later in Blender.

For the hair simulation, I created a low-poly cage of the hair and applied a cloth simulation to it. Empties were then parented to each segment of the cage, and the hair bones were given a damped track on the empties. This allowed me to tweak the general shape of the hair by moving the empties, even after the simulation.

In the end, this workflow enabled me to fine-tune the simulation even after the cloth simulation was baked.

The Animation Workflow

After buying Iona's Maya Rig – Arcane Jinx (Non-Commercial), the tweaking in Blender was quite simple. Iona's Maya rig included several controller bones that weren't needed for my workflow. So I just isolated the rig to the deformer bones and exported the model and the skeleton to MotionBuilder where I set it up with the standard HIK rig. MotionBuilder is my favorite software for animation because of the animation layers where I can just keep polishing my animation by adding more and more layers on top. 

Amazingly though, Blender works well with my workflow once you add the animation layer plugin created by Tal Hershko, which I totally recommend!

Basically, my animation process for either MotionBuilder or Blender is to use the animation layers to experiment with what works best for the animation and to tweak the weight of the layer to either reduce or multiply the effect of the layer on the animation. In other words, I use the layer weight as a slider. 

For example, I would create a new layer specifically for tweaking the jiggle of the body when she claps her hands. By keeping the jiggle isolated on its own layer, I am able to make adjustments without affecting the rest of the animation. I can easily duplicate the layer to increase the jiggle intensity or decrease the layer weight to reduce the jiggle effect, all without touching the keyframes.

The finished product is essentially a combination of all these layers. Typically, I merge these layers and add additional ones on top for further polishing. I estimate having around 60+ layers for this Jinx animation.

As mentioned before, since the hair bones were tracking the empties which were parented to the vertices of the cloth sim, I could then just animate on top of the simulation and tweak the shape of the hair even after the baking process was done. Another way would have been to bake the constraints of the hair bones and use the animation layer to build on top of the animation as well! This was great because I could fine-tune the movement of the hair in a way that I couldn't when tweaking values and parameters in the cloth simulation. 

Rendering and Lightening

For rendering, I used Cycles, making full use of the volumetrics and the denoiser to achieve the desired effect. The light setup was standard, with a spotlight in the back. What really sold the effect was the volumetric shader, which effectively enhanced the smokey after-explosion effect seen in the actual bridge scene in Arcane. The issue I encountered was excessive artifacts in the render, even with the denoiser applied.

To overcome this problem, I limited the denoiser to only affect the albedo and disregarded the normal and any Z values behind the fog. This approach resulted in smooth fog without significantly increasing render times. Typically, this technique would sacrifice detail in the renders, but fortunately Arcane had a cartoony aesthetic, allowing me to work around the loss of detail.

Jinx's material was basically a toon shader mixed with an emission shader with a rim light applied on her as a separate render pass.

The extra graffiti/visual effects I added were image planes inserted in the scene and were set to emit light. That way it had a nice glow effect that was subtle but, in the end, gave more impact to the effects.

Final Words and Pieces of Advice

The project took around 10 days to complete in my spare time: around 6 days for animation, 2 days for figuring out the hair simulation, and another 2 days for final polish and rendering.

The main challenge I had for this was focusing on the animation itself. I was tempted to add more effects that would more closely resemble the effects they used in the Arcane series. However, I wanted to have this piece with animation as its focus and not the VFX/editing. It would be nice to see all those effects but it risked being too noisy to see the animations I did underneath. To overcome this, I often asked for feedback from my friends on what could be improved or if something was too overpowering already. 

For animation in Blender, I would recommend everything in Pierrick Picaut's channel, especially the Alive! Blender animation course. 

Even though I haven't gone through the course itself, the free content available on Pierrick's channel is already enough to confidently state that what you'll learn in that course is truly worth it.

Ave Espelita, Lead Animator at Ubisoft Philippines

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie