Ivo

"Ivo is a Tufted puffin, a seabird. He’s old for a puffin (18 years) and has been through a lot. Once because of his curiosity Ivo ended up breaking his left wing and so he can’t fly anymore.

Puffins mate for life, but unfortunately his partner has long passed. Since then Ivo travels the world alone while facing different challenges and telling his tale to anyone kind enough to listen."

Ivo was a project done for a character animation course in university, in a team of 3 people. The idea was to create a character that could fit into a game of our choice, from the concept stage all the way to animating and full implementation into the engine. We chose to put our character into the world of Ori games, which definitely posed quite the challenge. I made the original concept, model rigging, skinning and texturing as well as the animation implementation in Unreal Engine 4 plus cloth simulation for the cloak. Ivo's model was created by Katalin Preszl and all of the animations were done by Caroline Johansson.
This was one of the projects with a LOT of learning going on, and many things going wrong. Most visibly I had a misunderstanding with how cloth simulation actually worked, which led to mistakes in rigging the coat and the weird look of it in the final animations. But school projects are there to learn from, so all in all I think we achieved quite a good result, and I personally love Ivo as a character.