Fortnite Disco was my final project for a 3D animation course. The initial goal of the project was to make a disco scene where two 3D characters compete in a dance off. I intended to use models and the animations from the unreal engine game Fortnite. This ended up being a bit too ambitious of a goal, but I learned a lot about animation along the way. Below are demos for two projects that lead up to the final Fortnite Diso, followed by a demo of that project.
Key Frames, Quaternions, & Curves
The first OpenGL program is a keyframe animated scene of a Tie-Fighter chasing the Millenium Falcon through a scene. The goal of this program was simply to learn about and use keyframe-animation, interpolation, quaternions, and splines. The program allows the user to fly around the space and record keyframes capturing the camera’s position and orientation. Three of these sets of keyframes were applied to the three scene models (2 ships, and the camera). Quaternions are used for smooth rotation interpolation. The spline and terrain rendering was provided by an instructor.
Facial Animation
In my second OpenGL animation project, a wireframe face is animated to articulate some user provided text. The goal of this project was to gain some familiarity with animating the vertices of a model rather its position or orientation. There are 10 different variations of the basic face model made in Blender to represent several mouth-shapes corresponding to various basic phonetic sounds. The text is read at a constant rate and a rudimentary decision tree picks the current and next mouth-shapes to animate between.
Character Animation & Animation Blending
In the final part of the class I was ready to tackle the initial goal and create a Fortnite disco. The first challenge in doing this was extracting the models and animations from the encrypted Fortnite game files. Thankfully, decryption keys gathered from a memory dump of the running game were available from many anonymous sources online. The next step was converting the skeletons and their animations to the autodesk FBX format. The FBX-SDK was used to read FBX animation files into a skeleton (bone-tree) data structure; this conversion functionality was provided by the instructor. Each skeleton has 2 idle animations, a forward and backward walking animation, and 12 dance animations. Functionality is provided for rendering the skeleton while interpolating the animations from idle to walking and back to idle and from idle to dancing and back to idle. This is just about everything needed to realize the initial goal; however, the two person dance off became a single person performance due to time constraints. Also the rendering of the character models was abandoned in favor of rendering the skeleton so that model skinning wouldn’t have to be accounted for. In the final scene, the character walks up, strikes his idle pose, then goes through each of his dances a few times, blending into and out of idle between each.