Capstone

Meet NORA,

the Mystical Thief

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  • Abstract

    Capstone Project: NORA, The Mystic Thief

    Austin Anderton

    Animation and Games

    Bass School, UTDallas

    As an animator, I wanted to explore creating a character’s personality from a pre-made visual appearance and make that character playable in a video game. I always find it interesting how different people can have completely separate interpretations of a character with the same appearance. In a way, this project plays on people’s biases of characters based on visual appearance. Part of this project aims to create a character with nonbinary traits, having neither masculine or feminine characteristics from their movements and actions. The character’s visual appearance may lean toward feminine features, however as an animator, my goal is to have viewers question the character’s traits.

    This project NORA: The Mystic Thief is a series of character animations created by me, using a pre-made 3D model by artist and animator Kiel Figgins. NORA’s character animations will be put into a game engine, allowing NORA to be a playable character in a pre-made fantasy game environment by artist Styl Arts. The character NORA is a competent thief that travels in search of loot to barter and trade across different fantasy lands. Some of the tools I used for animating NORA are Maya and Studio Library, and I used Unreal Engine 5 for importing the Maya animations onto the NORA character rig. The importing process involves saving my animations in Maya as an FBX file, then putting the FBX files into Unreal Engine, and hooking up the animations to trigger when the character is doing a specific action. An “FBX” file stands for “filmbox” which is a file format that is adaptable and flexible between different 3D animation software and owned by Autodesk, the company that made my primary software for animating Maya.

  • Artist Statement

    When creating, I keep in mind fluidity, attention to detail, and expressive movement. My art is in the form of 3D animation with the goal of communicating strong emotions with context and intensity while achieving feelings of joy, surprise, disgust, and fear. With an admiration of 3D animation as the intersection of art and technology, I am inspired by animations that show originality and make me laugh and cry through body and facial expressions.

    My work expresses these strong emotions by adding details to my animation that help convey such distinct feelings. I have chosen 3D animation as my medium because it is what I was first introduced to in my high school animation class where I learned of the hard work that goes into 3D animation and gained a deep appreciation for animated movies, TV shows, and short films. Also, I prefer 3D space because of the complexity and depth of working in multiple dimensions and axes. Because of the depth that 3D space provides, I can exaggerate the movements to help amplify the emotions of the animation often in a short period of time. Often in animation, you need to literally and figuratively “sell” your work, which is why it is important to amplify the emotions and movements of an animation to captivate your audience. To help me amplify my animation, I shoot abundant amounts of video reference so that I can capture the appropriate timing and find areas or movements that allow for exaggeration.

    My previous experience as a dancer and dance teacher allows me to incorporate my knowledge about dance into my animation work. With my dance training, I have a better understanding of how the body executes movement, which helps me make decisions on how to animate and show fluid movement. With that knowledge, I am challenging myself to add small adjustments and movements to help me achieve the strong emotions I want to invoke. In exploring animation, I hope to find new ways to make viewers feel strong emotions through my work and successfully convey my ideas with fluid and expressive movement.

  • About the Process

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