Activity
4K followers
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisMaya to Unreal Lattice Workflow! We recently got some time to evaluate our Autodesk Maya to Unreal Engine workflows with a focus on how to transfer geometry deformed by lattices. Our show Tiny Buds features characters with large expressive eyes, combining that with a small team meant we had to look at reusable eye rigs. This resulted in using lattices to deform the eyes for each character while maintaining the animation requirements. During production we resorted to using geometry caching to meet the show deadline, which leaves a heavy data foot print. With help from Media Cymru we could look more deeply at the problem, which lead us to our Maya to Unreal workflow and would like to share our findings with others facing the same production issue. Full walkthrough: https://lnkd.in/eJnTmnHV #Maya #UnrealEngine5 #Rigging #TechnicalAnimation #CharacterRigging #RealtimePipeline #TechArt
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisA bit late in sharing this — the Unreal Control Rig Workshop happened back in March, but due to personal work commitments , I couldn’t post about it earlier. I had a great experience being part of this workshop over the past couple of weeks. It was exciting to explore modern rigging workflows inside Unreal Engine and work with Control Rig, Modular Rig, and physics systems in a real-time production environment. Coming from a character rigging and animation background, it felt really good to reconnect with these fundamentals while also learning how these workflows are evolving inside Unreal Engine. One of the most inspiring parts of the workshop was seeing the incredible work created by other artists, animators, and TDs throughout the sessions. There were many creative rigs and interesting technical solutions shared during the workshop, and it was amazing to learn from everyone involved. A huge thank you to all the Epic Games instructors and mentors for sharing their knowledge, helping us solve technical challenges, and making the entire workshop such a valuable learning experience: Julie Lottering, Kevin Miller, Chase Cooper, Helge Mathee, Benoît GADREAU, Jeremie Passerin, Sean Humphrey, Shenaz Baksh, Sean Lake, Ed Bennett, Anthony Koithra, James Henry Burton, Matt Ringot, Ferris Webby and Epic Games Sharing my final workshop submission after adding some additional polishing and improvements. and everyone involved behind the scenes. Special thanks to GlobalStep and Arturo Pulecio for all the support, for sharing the character assets for rigging practice, and for giving me the opportunity to attend the workshop while managing regular work responsibilities. I truly appreciate the encouragement and support throughout the program. Looking forward to applying these learnings and experimenting more with Unreal Engine rigging workflows in future projects. #UnrealEngine #UE5 #UnrealEngine5 #MadeWithUnreal #UnrealEditor #EpicGames #UnrealEngineTraining #UnrealEngineEducation #UnrealEngineRiggingWorkshop #ControlRig #ControlRigTraining #Rigging #RiggingTraining #AnimationTools #AnimationTraining #Blueprints #BlueprintTraining #LearnUnrealEngine #Upskilling #Reskilling #TechnicalTraining #ProfessionalDevelopment
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisCome join us, the ad says it all!Chase Cooper reposted thisWE'RE AT YOUR SERVICE! Now that Unreal Engine 5.8 is here come Level Up Your Skills with us! Three intensive workshops over three days! Get the key updates all at once from Gold Badged Unreal Authorized Instructors Sean Spitzer and Sean Lake (the "Seantourage")! Secure your spot and take advantage of our early bird pricing! For more details, visit: https://lnkd.in/eiunWrat #ue58 #levelup #unrealauthorizedinsturctor #uai #epicgames #unrealengine #screenindustrytraininghub #unrealtrainingpartner #training #accessibletraining #diversestories #traininganddevelopment #professionaldevelopment #upskill #reskill #storytelling #diversityequityinclusion #creativetechnology #creativetech #filmmaking #independentfilm #filmproduction #gameengine #metahuman #animation #controlrig #livelink #digital #innovation #community #buildingcommunity
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisProcedural spider WIP I created a procedural spider robot system in UE5 using Control Rig. Everything about this little guy’s movement is fully procedural and driven by math. There are still a few things I want to tweak; for example, the hind leg and the front left leg currently share the same offset, so I want to refine the leg behavior a bit more. The legs also use an IK solver to adapt to the ground height, so they’re always making proper contact with the surface. It also has a subtle look-at system that follows the camera rotation, done in the ABP. I made this to participate in Matt Lakeᵀᴬ’s 1000 discord members challenge. Feel free to join! https://lnkd.in/ejBZMfcA
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisSébastien Albert demonstrated the new Direct Mesh Control (DMC) feature in Control Rig, which allows mesh surfaces to be used as controllers. See this and more in Unreal Engine 5.8 preview: https://lnkd.in/dFxAcDS2
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisWith Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview, the new DMC (Direct Mesh Control) feature in Control Rig (inspired by Pixar’s Presto), we can now use mesh highlights as controllers, significantly cleaning up the viewport. Great feature addition Chase Cooper Fredrik Nilsson and team ! Also loving the new Simple View for Sequencer with its integrated Dope Sheet mode. #UE58PREVIEW #UnrealEngine #ControlRig #TechnicalArt #EpicGames #loopscreativestudio
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisProcedural IK vs. reinforcement learning: two ways to make a spider mech walk 🤓 Abdul Haseeb posted a 6-leg spider mech rig working procedurally with UE5 Control Rig. 100% procedural + IK in UE5 Control Rig. Zero animation clips, no timeline. – Step timing via array-based intervals with modulo resets, so legs never tangle or overlap. – Downward traces adapt foot placement to terrain, slopes, tight corridors, and 90° walls. – Full rig evaluates at ~300μs per frame (0.3ms; the in-video overlay shows 314.76μs). At a 144 FPS budget of 6.9ms per frame, that's under 5%. About that 300μs – that's quite fast for a fully procedural multi-leg system with per-frame terrain traces. In UE5, Control Rig evaluates on worker threads by default, not on the main thread, so the cost isn't competing with the gameplay/render path in the same way as something running on the main. If Arc Raiders comes to mind when watching the demo, Embark uses a fundamentally different technique for its multi-legged ARC enemies. Their locomotion for the larger ARC drones is trained with reinforcement learning rather than authored as animation clips. The behavior is emergent: if you shoot a leg off, the system finds a way to keep the unit balanced that wasn't keyframed anywhere. Embark has a technical deep-dive talk called Transforming Animation with Machine Learning if you want the architectural details. – Procedural IK + rules (Abdul's approach): cheap (sub-millisecond), predictable, no training pipeline, exact foot placement. Behavior is bounded by what you wrote – damage states and weird edge cases need explicit handling. vs. ML-trained locomotion (Arc Raiders' approach): emergent, handles arbitrary disruption gracefully, looks alive. Much more expensive at runtime, requires a full simulation/training pipeline, and deterministic control gets harder. AAA games tend to choose the ML path when budget allows, but most indie/mid-size studios and short-cycle shipping projects use procedural IK because it's tractable, fast, and can be built in a week. UE5 ships with a built-in Locomotor node in Control Rig for exactly this kind of system. Locomotor is a fast starting point, but custom lets you fine-tune gait logic and step ordering. Original thread: https://lnkd.in/dbEnHQUP
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisThis is a bit of an older rig and a control rig experiment, but with the launch of Ozone Story Tech's Ozone Subdivs, I figured it was time to share. This was a test exploring a non-joint-based facial rig running in Unreal Engine, and how well Ozone Subdivs holds up that workflow (skip to 1:20 to see Ozone Subdivs at work). The underlying rig is built on Ozone Story Tech Biped system. With new rigging tools on the horizon, I’m intentionally not going too deep into the setup here, but there are some awesome updates coming soon! On the Unreal Engine side, Control Rig continues to impress. The flexibility, especially in 5.7, made this process a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to making a deep-dive on how this was built. Also, credit to Colson Ayars who designed, painted, and did the initial sculpt of this character, Arthur. Ozone Subdivs - https://lnkd.in/g9RFP3_y #unrealengine #rigging #ozone #ozonesubdivision #controlrig
-
Chase Cooper reposted thisChase Cooper reposted thisI am very excited to announce that Ozone Story Tech Subdivs for Unreal Engine has officially launched! Any Skeletal Mesh can now be converted to an Ozone Subdiv... allowing traditional Film / TV modeling and rigging subdivision surface workflows to work directly in engine. Some key wins: 1-1 asset conversion from traditional subdiv pipelines into engine for rendering. No modeling changes required. Resolution independent assets, allowing for progressive quality adjustment as needed. LOD forward vs traditional subtractive LODs. Subdiv meshes are less dense which makes them lighter on disk, faster to load and much easier to model, rig and art direct. 4-16x fewer vertices need to be managed. And much more :) If you are an Animation or Game Studio using Unreal Game Engine... download, try and buy here: https://lnkd.in/gD_eeNXp Rob Di Figlia Ben Minall Chase Cooper Fredrik Nilsson Duncan Burbidge Paul Doyle William Vaughan Vaishak Purushothaman Douglas Bell Quentin Defrance Reel FX Animation Ryan McNeely Eric Soulvie Jason Bickerstaff Brad Clark Atomic Cartoons Mark Andrews Daniel Urbach Brian Rausch Henning Sanden
-
Chase Cooper liked thisChase Cooper liked thisHeading to Annecy this June — and I'd love to see you there. I'll be at MIFA during the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (23–26 June 2026) and I'm setting aside time for studios and mGear users who want to geek out. What we can cover, in person: ✅ Live demos of the latest mGear features — Shifter, Rigbits new tools, and the quality-of-life work that's landed this year ✅ Recent production examples built on mGear ✅ A first look at where the framework is heading in 2026/27 ✅ Production support, Rigging on demand services and Training — how mcsGear Services plug into your pipeline Whether you're already Rigging with mGear or evaluating it for an upcoming show — drop me a line and let's grab a coffee at the market. 📩 hello@mcsgear.com — or DM me here. It's free and open source. Own your character pipeline. #Annecy2026 #MIFA #mGear #Rigging #CharacterPipeline #Animation #Maya
-
Chase Cooper liked thisChase Cooper liked thisMaya to Unreal Lattice Workflow! We recently got some time to evaluate our Autodesk Maya to Unreal Engine workflows with a focus on how to transfer geometry deformed by lattices. Our show Tiny Buds features characters with large expressive eyes, combining that with a small team meant we had to look at reusable eye rigs. This resulted in using lattices to deform the eyes for each character while maintaining the animation requirements. During production we resorted to using geometry caching to meet the show deadline, which leaves a heavy data foot print. With help from Media Cymru we could look more deeply at the problem, which lead us to our Maya to Unreal workflow and would like to share our findings with others facing the same production issue. Full walkthrough: https://lnkd.in/eJnTmnHV #Maya #UnrealEngine5 #Rigging #TechnicalAnimation #CharacterRigging #RealtimePipeline #TechArt
-
Chase Cooper liked thisChase Cooper liked thisI'm gearing up for #UnrealFest Chicago! If you're struggling to put together your session schedule, I'd like to humbly offer my "Agenda for The Performance-Conscious". There's a main throughline, as well as some branching into performance-adjacent features and topics (Mass, Foliage). Wednesday 10:45am - Profiling with Pirates: Performance Plundered from a Real Game (Ari Arnbjörnsson and Matt Oztalay are back at it) 11:45am - Lessons Learned from Building a Very Large Open World Game in UE5 (from the fine folks at Unknown Worlds) 2:00pm - How to Start Your Project at 60 FPS and Keep It There 3:00pm - A Frame’s Life: Frame Timing, Synchronization, and Latency in UE OR - Unlearning OOP: Data-Oriented Gameplay Design with ECS and Mass Entity (Pre-req for the next one, IMO) 4:30pm - How to Build Scalable MetaHuman Crowds in Unreal Engine Thursday 9:00am - This gets a little packed, but I think they all cater to different folks - Building Living World Creatures with Niagara - Growing Trees in Unreal Engine: PVE 5.8 New Features and Roadmap - Profiling Unreal Engine on Mobile with Platform-Native Tools - UI Performance & Invalidation Debugging (Cody Albert) 10:45am - Project Health in Unreal Engine: The Technical Indicators That Matter (Camille Kay) 11:45am - Breaking Performance Barriers: Lessons from Optimizing Chaos OR - Fighting the Frame Budget: Stage Optimization Lessons from 2XKO 2:00pm - Learnings from an Unreal Shared Technology Group at Xbox 3:00pm - You've got a break, maybe check out our talk about the technical art of the Fortnite Simpsons season? 4:30pm - Systemic Shader Reduction: How We Cut Fortnite’s Shaders by 60% OR - Sound Profiling and Debugging with Audio Insights
-
Chase Cooper liked thisChase Cooper liked thisDrove down to L.A to say hello to some old friends, including Blur Studio folks. Got a nice little present from them. Thank you!! Blurian for ever!
-
Chase Cooper liked thisChase Cooper liked thisA bit late in sharing this — the Unreal Control Rig Workshop happened back in March, but due to personal work commitments , I couldn’t post about it earlier. I had a great experience being part of this workshop over the past couple of weeks. It was exciting to explore modern rigging workflows inside Unreal Engine and work with Control Rig, Modular Rig, and physics systems in a real-time production environment. Coming from a character rigging and animation background, it felt really good to reconnect with these fundamentals while also learning how these workflows are evolving inside Unreal Engine. One of the most inspiring parts of the workshop was seeing the incredible work created by other artists, animators, and TDs throughout the sessions. There were many creative rigs and interesting technical solutions shared during the workshop, and it was amazing to learn from everyone involved. A huge thank you to all the Epic Games instructors and mentors for sharing their knowledge, helping us solve technical challenges, and making the entire workshop such a valuable learning experience: Julie Lottering, Kevin Miller, Chase Cooper, Helge Mathee, Benoît GADREAU, Jeremie Passerin, Sean Humphrey, Shenaz Baksh, Sean Lake, Ed Bennett, Anthony Koithra, James Henry Burton, Matt Ringot, Ferris Webby and Epic Games Sharing my final workshop submission after adding some additional polishing and improvements. and everyone involved behind the scenes. Special thanks to GlobalStep and Arturo Pulecio for all the support, for sharing the character assets for rigging practice, and for giving me the opportunity to attend the workshop while managing regular work responsibilities. I truly appreciate the encouragement and support throughout the program. Looking forward to applying these learnings and experimenting more with Unreal Engine rigging workflows in future projects. #UnrealEngine #UE5 #UnrealEngine5 #MadeWithUnreal #UnrealEditor #EpicGames #UnrealEngineTraining #UnrealEngineEducation #UnrealEngineRiggingWorkshop #ControlRig #ControlRigTraining #Rigging #RiggingTraining #AnimationTools #AnimationTraining #Blueprints #BlueprintTraining #LearnUnrealEngine #Upskilling #Reskilling #TechnicalTraining #ProfessionalDevelopment
Experience & Education
-
Epic Games
View Chase’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
or
Publications
-
Warcraft: Raising a Horde
Siggraph
See publicationFor "Warcraft", ILM was tasked with creating an entire horde of orcs that would be unique members of different clans with variations in shape, gender, clothing, hair, and materials. The team created a flexible variation pipeline to provide randomization for each clan member and allow efficient reuse across disciplines.
Chase Cooper, Eileen Bai, Brian Paik, Vick Schutz
Industrial Light & Magic -
Warcraft's Durotan: Hero, Complex
Siggraph
See publicationWhile embracing the signature Warcraft style, ILM had to build a photoreal character that pushed development throughout the pipeline, from complex hair styles to stretching the boundaries of ILM's performance capture and simulating the movement of skin over tusks, ensuring that the complex hero Durotan was ready for his closeup.
Victor Schutz, Paul Giacoppo, Chase Cooper
Industrial Light & Magic
Projects
-
Control Rig Samples Pack
-
Reference rigs and workflows used by developers learning Control Rig in Unreal Engine.
-
Modular Control Rig
-
Core rigging architecture and modules used for building rigs in Unreal Engine.
-
Rigging Workshop
-
Designed and architected the Unreal Engine Rigging Workshop, educating over 200 professionals across multiple US and EMEA cohorts. Drove public release of material gaining 20k views in over 6 weeks.
Honors & Awards
-
Annie Award Nominee 2012 - Animated Effects in Animated Production (Rango)
-
-
SIGGRAPH S.p.a.c.e. Poster Best in Show
-
-
Eagle Scout
-
Recommendations received
-
LinkedIn User
5 people have recommended Chase
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top content