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.