Jordan Brown

During my time at Shiver Entertainment, I had the opportunity to work on several projects, most of them being internal. Sadly, the internal ones have never seen the light of day.

On these projects I was the entire animation department! From rigging, skinning, animating, and in engine animations systems creation and maintaining. If it moved, I was responsible.

The first project was a top-down, arcade like twin stick shooter, where the player would have to wade through hordes of enemies and complete a variety of challenges to progress from level to level. Challenges would include puzzles, time trials, bosses, collectables. The project was themed to 80’s / 90’s horror movies, and the levels, enemies, bosses reflected this. Most notably this affected the enemy NPCs. Each needed its own unique control rig, and animation set, and some had extensive interactions with the player. The animations were stylized and very expressive to make sure the player identified actions and behaviours from the top down camera angle. There were around 60 NPCs 8 bosses, each needing 6-10 animations. Each boss had an introduction cinematic animation, as well as every few levels had cinematic sequences to progress the story, all I had Animated in Maya. By the time I left the company, this project was complete barring some network coding work to be done.

The second project was a 3rd person shooter, where eight players would compete to gather the most points before the end of the match. The method of points acquisition depended on the gamemode primarily, but would also receive points from other player eliminations. The animation sets for these characters were far more narrow in scope since they all shared the same central skeleton, with any additional joints being handled via in engine dynamics.

• Created control rigs for all characters, over 60 characters.
• Animated gameplay animations for all player characters and NPC enemies, and bosses.
• Directed and animated cinematic animations.
• Created and maintain animation systems in engine.

• Worked in Unreal Engine 4/5 to create blueprint logic for dynamic animation.
• Creation of control rigs for characters( skinning, joint chains for dynamics).
• Collaborated with other departments on the creation process of characters.
• Facial rigging of characters, with legacy method and 3Lateral tools.
• Optimizing in engine assets to run on low end hardware and switch.

•Rigging characters for cinematics(skinning, joint chains for dynamics).
•Recorded character performances with inertial Motion Capture Suit.
•Hand Keyframe character animations, animated cameras.
•Creation of in engine Dynamics(Cloth Dynamics, Groom Hair Dynamics).
•Creation of Level Sequence for cinematics for rendering.