Dark Deku Fan Art - Gameplay Animation

Here are some animations created for use in a video game. I handled both the rigging and the animation in Maya, then adapted and optimized them in Unreal Engine 5. The goal was to stay true to the chosen character’s personality (in this case, Dark Deku from My Hero Academia) and reflect it in the movement, while ensuring the animations remained suitable for gameplay.

I chose to show you these four animations because the run and idle cycles are usually the first animations a player sees when starting a game, and I also included an attack and a roll to demonstrate how the character behaves and reacts during gameplay. All animations were created to be fully usable in Unreal, both with and without motion matching, and designed to remain clear and readable from multiple angles: from a third-person camera behind the character for the player controlling them, but also from the perspective of another player observing the action.