Updating Old Shots

Part of me updating my portfolio is going back to old shots and applying what I know now to what I did before.  And man, it's a doozy of an update.  In a nutshell, I went back and did lighting and camera for both shots.  I also went back and fixed a slew of timing issues, as well as touched on a lot of the animation, based on what I know now, versus what I knew then.

The Imp Mage one was always meant to have lighting, but the tests I did never matched the lighting concept I started with. The Leaping Thief animation got the most animation touchups and it had an ending added back in.

First up is the Dungeon Crawl Imp Wizard animation.  With the updated lighting, the drama of the monster in the shadows should hopefully read a lot better now than it did before.  He holds the glowing staff for a long longer now, giving time to see the imp's face, for the camera to shift, and for the viewer to see the monster's breathing, before seeing the imp's reaction.



Second is the Dungeon Crawl Leaping Thief animation.  This one needed the new camera and lighting, which meant adding a lot more of the background in.  I did a number of animation changes as well, such as covering his head a bit, as he runs through the traps.  But the biggest animation change is to the end;  I had cut out the original ending because the slow climb up just didn't match the cocky thief at the beginning.  I've replaced it with a dramatic ledge slip to show off that he knew the risk he was taking.



And since this one was missing a nice camera, here's the dynamic camera to go with the update!

Big Sword Animation, First Pass

This one is just a quick update.  I went through it and fixed all of the timing.  I've done a first pass to smooth out everything, and to doubly check the timing, since blocking does a great job at hiding it (I usually block in linear for that reason).  My next step is to go through and clean up all of my arcs, especially in that body.  I've done a bit of it already, but I have a lot more to do.

And for fun, here's a rough camera test, too.

Big Sword Man Animation, Blocking

Here's the current animation I'm working on.  I've been wanting to do a heavy sword combo for a while now.  Right now I'm still blocking it out, using a slightly different method than I have before.  So far I've learned a few things from this one:

1. Joe Daniel's Body Mechanics Rigs are awesome! They're worth every penny.  They have some great features that really show off body mechanics, such as the twisting in the arms/legs.  It does help that they are fairly blank.  Also, I always forget how ridiculously useful turning on and off body parts is.

2. Along those lines, I'm mostly in IK arm space for this one, it really helps to block the hands without the arms visible.  I can focus on where they need to be, then turning on the arms later, I can adjust them so the elbow actually works properly.  In fact, the left hand was the very last thing I touched in the video above.

3. Getting good reference isn't enough unless you are inspired by it too.  I mean, that's obvious, right?  I tried to jump into this one though, with some reference I had shot a month or two ago, and I was just struggling.  When I recorded some fresh reference though, I found the excitement that the old stuff just didn't give me.  I had to delete some old work, but it was absolutely worth doing.

I'll be posting an update fairly soon!