iAnimate Games Workshop 1 - walk and run (and sprint)

This assignment was to do a run cycle. I've done a number of walk cycles already, of course, so I wanted to do something other than the standard humanoid I'm used to. This cute turtle ended up being an unexpected challenge. (Perfect!)

I knew I wanted to do multiple walks/runs from the beginning. I started with a walk, a run, and a sprint; which was more like a meander, a tired gallop, and a run. You can see the sprint in the progress reel, though I ended up taking it out before it went to far. Because of the size of his legs, it ended up being a little too similar to the run, and I had to do all of it in about 8 frames per step. I cut it out so I could focus on the longer walk and run, and get into all of the fun little details.

One thing that I am still not too sure if I made the right call, is the shell deformation. I had the option to leave it rigid, make it really soft and pliable, or what I ended up doing, hit somewhere in the middle. I did a number of tests just to see which one felt the most natural. Since he was not specifically a game model, I had some nice controls to make up for the fact that he isn't really designed to move in a full sprint.

Here's the scrapped WIP sprint, for good measure (of course, I didn't get too far):

RR Hero Run Cycle

Just finished our hero's run, as well as the final Unity proof-of-concept.  Now I have to work on all of the enemies and the various interactions between the hero and these enemies.

This guy will constantly charges into enemies, just for your enjoyment.  What a nice guy.

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Make-A-Wish Game

FIEA was recently approached by the Make-A-Wish foundation to make a child's wish to create a video game.  A number of the students volunteered to create a base for a game that we could work on.  We put the framework together in about a week, while still working on our respective projects.

I decided to do a quick animation set for the character.  A spell cast, a swing, a jump, and simple movement.



Also we got to eat lunch with him, shoot each other with our obligatory Nerf guns, and then we played a bit of League of Legends.  He was a cool kid.

Grapple - Heavy Mocap Cleanup - run cycle and Amina actions

One nice thing about motion capture is how fast you can turn around animations, or you'd think.  The idea is that you start your animation past the blocking stage; mocap sort of gives that to you.  There is a lot of work involved in making it loop properly, but the cleanup stage feels an awful like blocking, just with a whole lot of keys.  But occasionally you'll come across an animation that needs heavier keying.  This is an example where mocap didn't give me what I wanted.



To start off, I was never really happy with the original data we recorded.  The actor didn't quite embody the character I was going for, and I didn't actively realize it until late in the process.  We eventually re-recorded the data, this time with myself as the actor, and got a better performance for the character, which helped.  But then there was the problem with movement speed.  We chose to use root motion on the project, instead of having motion controlled programatically.  This means the way the character feels is controlled by the animators, not the designers; that means animation cycles are spent exporting over and over for the design team.  Mistake number two.

I ended up spending a week tweaking all of the 4 run cycles (each direction) to increase the speed as much as possible without breaking the rig.  And in-between all of that, I was constantly checking it in UDK to see how it worked out.  By the end of it, I essentially doubled the move-speed in each direction by dropping the character's hips and increasing stride length across the board.

After all of that, I can't tell what would have taken longer, motion capture or keyframe animation.  I'd like to think that mocap was still a bit quicker, because we may have run into the same problems with in-game speed; though it would have been really easy to check early on with keyframe animation.

For good measure, here are a few more mixed animations.  The first video is completely keyed, except for the idle.  The second video uses mocap data at the beginning and end.

Walk Cycle Ball in Flash

The goal was to take the walk cycle from before and re-do it in Adobe Flash to learn how the Flash armatures worked.  It was a struggle, but I finally figured them out (after re-rigging my character numerous times) to the point where they functioned for me.  I added the bits and pieces to get a little more practice in.


I preferred the hand-drawn method better.  I had more control and could fudge more things, while this ended up feeling a little stiff.  The Flash armatures felt like they were just not quite there yet, but I feel like I could end up using them in the future and be happy.

Walk Cycle Ball Animation

We just had to do a walk cycle with just legs.  This just sort of evolved while I was working on the first part.  I wanted to do some run cycles, which is where the smaller leg balls came from.

Walk Cycles

This assignment was to learn walk cycles, and apply the knowledge of arcs and overlapping action. We selected from several pre-modeled characters, so we could come back and animate them later. I decided to do a 3/4 view to make it more challenging.