Final Presentation

This semester I've focused on creating game animations all semester. My very first week I created a schedule full of the animations I wanted to create and the time I would spend on all of them. I originally wanted to create game packs for different rigs, but soon discovered how unrealistic that goal was considering the amount of work I had for other project heavy classes as well as actual work outside of school. I actually ended up having to work on animations for this class during downtime I had in other classes, which wasn't the most ideal.

The first few weeks I wanted to start out simple and get back into the swing of animating and use simple rigs with simple actions. So I created an idle, kick, and stomp animation using rigs from the body mechapack.







After getting the hang of things again I decided to move onto a cool Cyborg rig that I found. I really wanted to make a game pack for this rig but after working on this dodge animation, my desire to work with this rig basically disappeared upon realizing how restricting it was. It took a few weeks to get this animation close to where I wanted it, but it was definitely a good learning experience along the way,  especially seeing how much I was able to improve it over a week.



After that I moved on to a cool Faun rig that I found that reminded me a lot of World of Warcraft, so I started by making an idle for her as if her character was just standing in place with no actions for a while. This animation took longer than I anticipated a simple idle would take and idles aren't the most exciting animations to watch so its always a little disappointing putting a lot of work into something that isn't exciting to show off, but here it is.


I started an attack animation for this character as well, but after working on it for a while I somehow saved it somewhere on a school computer that wasn't in my project folder without noticing. So when I downloaded my project folder later to improve upon it, my scene file just wasn't there so that was a bit disappointing. I didn't have time during dead week to start it all over again, so that will have to be a project for the future. Luckily I do have some playblasts of the unfinished attack animation to show. I am a huge fan of this rig so I will definitely be doing more animations using it in the future.



Overall I am pretty pleased with the work that I have done over the past semester. I've learned a lot about time management, as well as the type of animation that I am really interested in. While I love game animation, I really want to do some kind of animation short for next semester that I could use as a nice portfolio piece.

Week 13

This week I was mainly working on other classes and wasn't able to get any work done for this animation this week. I wasn't able to get any feedback last week so I'm hoping I can utilize the next class period so I know what else I have to work on.

But here it is so far:

Week...?

This week I continued with the Faun Rig and decided to make a quick little attack animation.





I haven't worked on any fine details like the hair or her necklace yet because I want to smooth out her motion a bit more first. Her spear's movement gets a little choppy towards the end and I've been struggling a little bit to fix it because of the select amount of frames I have to work with. The speed is also something I'm not certain about yet as well.

Week 9

This week I've made a bit of progress on my fauns idle. I added a kicking motion to it to make it less boring, but I still think it needs some tweaks. I animated the hair a little bit but still need to work on the details. Some parts of it look a bit weird to me but I can't really pinpoint what exactly so I'm hoping for some feedback. I also still need to work on the movement of the necklace and that piece of cloth that hangs off of her pants. After I'm done working on this I want to do some sort of combo move using her spear.

Week 8

This week I have started working with the Faun rig. I decided to start with an idle animation where I have her doing some kind of action rather than just standing there breathing the whole time.

Unfortunately after working on it for a while I somehow unknowingly deleted one of her wrist controllers without realizing it and had recently saved after I did it so there was no getting it back. I was going to figure out how to transfer animation from one rig to another but decided I would just restart because the more practice the better I guess. But because of this I only had time to get the basic beginning of the idle where I have her breath and look around. I want to add some kind of action afterwards where she either scratches behind her horn or kicks her back leg out a bit. What I have right now isn't very polished so I need to do that as well.

I hope to have the entire idle done by next week as well as having started some kind of attack animation with her spear.

Week 7

This week has been pretty crazy and busy for me so I wasn't able to to add on to the cyborgs animation like I wanted to. I did revise it mostly last week and a little bit more this week. It still isn't perfect, but it is definitely way better than it was 2 weeks ago. I've been struggling to work with this rig because its hip and chest don't allow much in terms of curves.

Here's the first playblast I showed 2 weeks ago:

 And the updated version:



I added the anticipation at the beginning and a settle at the end just for fun. It still clearly has some issues like the his hip scoop at the end when he gets to the final pose.

I wanted to create an entire game pack for this character, but I'm somewhat annoyed with this rig at the moment so I think I am going to go to a different rig for the time being and maybe come back to this one later on in the semester.

I found this Faun rig that I want to try out. I am having trouble unlocking some of her controllers so I need to figure that out before I can start anything with her.

Week 6

This week I have continued working on my cyborg dodge. I took notes of everything I was told to fix by my peers and have fixed most of them at this point. I worked on adding a frame when the cyborg reaches the peak of his flip so that it doesn't look like his foot teleports anymore. I adjusted the head and its timing for when he looks back to the front, among a bunch of other different small adjustments. I am now just focusing on fixing random jumps in frames that seem to stand out and distract the eye.

This is what I have so far:



Once I fine tune the details a bit more I want to add an idle animation to the beginning of the sequence and then hopefully add on to it after the dodge. I eventually want to have a full animation pack for this character with a good amount of animations in it so that I can move on to a different character.