Mass Effect Viewmodel Animations
Bringing an idea to life
I’m a fan of the Mass Effect trilogy. I enjoy the characters and the interesting world building of the universe, and I feel like the universe has a lot of stories to tell. I’m also a fan of first person action games, and wanted to bring these two things I enjoyed together. So I grabbed some assets from Mass Effect 2 and 3 and made it work.
I used Blender to put these scenes together. I utilized the AutoRig Pro plugin to get the arms working quickly, with a little custom rigging work for the weapons. I found muzzle flash assets from the games and added them via a particle system, using a method from Pierrick Picaut.
Compared to an earlier attempt (seen below,) I was able to do a lot more work in Blender itself, rather than having to rely on compositing. I feel like I’ve definitely improved since that attempt, and I hope my work speaks for that.
Lastly, I’m not affiliated with EA or Bioware, and I’m using these assets for practice and not for commercial use. Please don’t sue me!
Mass Effect M3 Pistol Experiment
The first attempt
In 2021, I wanted to try animating Mass Effect weapons in first person, but I didn’t know where to get assets. I created the blocked out model of the M3 Predator pistol with enough detail to be functional. Details were added like the thermal clip ejection cover and the rack-able rear sight fixture to make the gun more plausible from the first person perspective.
I made a custom rig for the gun and the arms in Blender, with additional math work needed to get a keyable FOV control on the camera rig instead of just on the camera.
I rendered two passes for AfterEffects compositing, the foreground with the gun and the background shooting range. Muzzle effects were simply placed in AfterEffects in-between the two render layers.