Destiny 2: Loyal Companion Make-A-Wish Emote
Loyal Companion Emote, available from the Eververse Archive all season, with all proceeds going to Bungie Foundation in support of Make-A-Wish.
The Artemis plush, based off of the dog/emote, available in the Bungie Store with all proceeds going to charity.
The reference image of Artemis, Cristian's Belgian Malinois.
The initial prototype: Knowing how much Artemis meant to Cristian, I wanted to attempt to get as close to Artemis's look as possible, while still staying within our technical and budgetary constraints for emotes, using a modified ROI wolf model/texture
While I was working on the Lookdev prototyping, Angela Melito and Doug Magruder were busy crafting the wonderful animation that the prop I created would follow.
Due to the budget for emotes in memory, most emote props are vertex animated. I helped refine our existing skeletal mesh animation process for emote props in order to give the dog the maximum amount of possible movement and expression.
Most of our emotes are single colors in order to preserve the visual language of them being "manifestation of a
Guardians inner light". I ended up using a modified 256x texture to drive the coloring of a shader I made to preserve the emote look and feel.
Previous versions of the emote felt more scary than cute, which is the feel we wanted to go for. Removing the mouth and eye details helped bring it back into the cute territory.
Final animation adjustments were needed in order to close the mouth and prevent some memory issues, giving this as the final result.
The poster presented to Cristian, with art by KevinRaganit
https://twitter.com/KevinRAGES
https://kevinrages.artstation.com
"Loyal Companion" is an emote I had the absolute pleasure of doing for Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted. The emote was requested by Cristian as part of a wish via Make-A-Wish, who wanted his dog, Artemis, a Belgian Malinois, to exist in his favorite game, Destiny 2. I was responsible for getting the look and feel of Artemis in-game to be as close as possible to his real life counterpart, all while staying within our rather strict art and technical guidelines. The result is what you see here. It was an absolute pleasure to be able to make someone's wish come true, and has certainly been a highlight of my career.
Our emotes have an extremely small memory limit for the animation, VFX, and code content for each one. To put this in perspective, most of my emails on a day-to-day basis are bigger than a single emote. Our emotes also stick to a very strict visual style, in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of Destiny's sandbox. With those challenges in consideration I was approached early on in development to see if we could work around these limitations to create a unique and special emote for Cristian. We shipped the "Wiggly Worm" emote in Season of the Risen that used some tech I had refined in order to support skeletal mesh use in emote props. This tech allows our VFX sequence to spawn a separate object, complete with it's own attached animations from the original emote animation file. Since the object exists outside of the emote/player animation, it gets around the memory limitation. I realized that we could use the same method for this emote in order to give it the maximum amount of possible movement and expression while staying within our memory limits. To ensure we could turn this content around quickly, we decided to modify an existing wolf mesh and rig used for the Rise of Iron wolves into Artemis by having me remove the extra fur and repaint the textures in order to match the reference image of Artemis as close as I could. These textures were then compressed into a 256x image that was fed into the shader I created for skeletal mesh emotes in order to take the color data it contained and color the emote based on it. Most emote props are 1 or 2 colors, and this ended up being our most detailed and colorful emote we've ever shipped.
I could not have done this project alone. Doug Magruder and Angela Melito were in charge of crafting the amazing animation that was the basis of this emote. Mark Flieg and Travis Treadway were essential in providing VFX feedback in order to make sure that this emote turned out the best it could be. Paxson Helgesen was in charge of crafting the dog audio for the emote, and Justin Dazet, Jarrod Luty, and Christine Edwards were essential in providing commerce design input and setting this whole thing up through the Bungie Foundation.
Special Thanks:
Mark Flieg and Travis Treadway: Rewards VFX Team
https://www.artstation.com/mfliegjr
https://www.artstation.com/travistreadway55
Doug Magruder: Animation
Angela Melito: Animation
Paxson Helgesen: Audio
Jarrod Luty, Christine Edwards: Bungie Foundation
Justin Dazet: Commerce Area Designer
Ian McIntosh: Original Wolf Character Artist
https://www.artstation.com/ian_mcintosh
Kevin Ragnit: Poster Illustration
https://www.artstation.com/kevinrages
And to everyone else at Bungie who helped support me and contributed to this wonderful world. "Teams are stronger than heroes".