Zoltar Speaks

This was my first project working as a Technical Artist at Everi's Top Shelf Studio. My focus in this title was mainly creating special effects and using the companies built in particle system. I created effects for each bonus including a really cool black hole for the red bonus. I created this with multiple programs starting with creating smoke simulations inside Blender that I refined and cut into spritesheets using photoshop. I also used Trapcode Particular to bake create effects that would be baked into spritesheets using photoshop and implemented as particles within the engine.

I also worked heavily in Spine to create a custom workflow for importing Spine animations into After Effects that would then be imported into the custom game engine. I did this by creating an After Effects extension with JavaScript after extensive research into the Spine internals, runtimes, JSON export format, and the After Effect's API.

The process involved creating many types of rigs to explore every required feature desired in animations by design. There were many areas where documentation was sparse and reverse engineering was required to match the animation within the Spine editor. One area specifically where this was needed was to match the keyframe interpolation used by spine where the standard After Effects interpolation did not match. Through trial and error I was able to match the spine interpolation with a custom algorithm to bake the animation into individual keyframes.