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.

Chip Facial Test

I recently had a project to rig up a face and animate it; the important part was making a script that did it automatically.  I just used the same head and morph deformers that I had made the previous year for the Chip model.  I had forgotten how fun animating faces was, as well as scripting.



Oh Chip, you're so racy.

Nassa the Gnome Animation and Mocap

We had an assignment to take some mocap data, and make 5 animations from it.  I decided to make it into a personal project, by running and directing my own mocap shoot to get exactly the shots I wanted.  And then, I proceeded to make thirty-some animations from that.  I modeled and rigged the character myself, and designed her to be in the style of a low-poly mobile game or a third person action game.

The attacks and attitude were based off of my DnD character (a naive dagger-wielding sorceress.)

I recently rendered them out, and I've included some of my favorites from that collection in the video below.  They are a mix of mocap cleanup and liberal keyframing.

Megacon 2013

I got to experience my first convention today.  I wasn't sure what to expect coming in, and I really enjoyed myself.  I went as Malzahar, from League of Legends.

I got stopped by a rather sizeable number of people for pictures, which was pretty flattering, as I didn't expect such a response.  A lot of people who stopped mentioned how they played the character, or that their friend main-ed him.  It made me proud to be a game developer, in that so many people were excited about a character from a video game, and automatically felt some kinship with a random stranger in Florida.

Probably my highlight of the convention was meeting up with all of the other League of Legends characters, since we all sort of had an affinity with each other.  I came a little late for the group shot, since we had trouble finding them outside, so I did miss a few.  All in all, though, it was a great experience.

Enjoy these pictures, with a rather handsome Malzahar and Ezreal, and also a Miss Fortune, Graves, and Caitlyn below.

Grapple Locomotion Animation Pre-Vis

This is a locomotion test for the grappling hook in the game, Grapple.  Right now, the game is getting a bit of a rehaul, and part of that is the player locomotion.  We are shifting to a flowing movement using the grappling hook, and given a number of situations provided by the designers, I've been asked to depict how it should feel from a player's perspective.

It is all animated on twos and fours at 30 fps.  Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't have the compression for accurate playback speed, but it is only an 'animated sketch' after all.

I drew out this simple environment, based on current concept art, and drew a path for the character to traverse.  I tried to include as many situations as possible; standing grapples, air grapples, swinging, enemy interaction, and most importantly, flowing movement.  I imagine it as parkour mixed with a grappling hook.

Animating a Corgi

Here are my animations for Tank, the Corgi. He was the main character in Intrepid. I animated the base locomotion, as well as a couple small actions.  I was never able to clean them up as much as I had wanted (especially the jump/bark) before the game was cut.  Check out the rigging post for some notes about animating the quadruped.

Rear and 3/4 playthrough of all of the animations



Idle animation


Walk, run, and sprint




Jump and bark (WIPs)



Sniff idle and sniff walk



Also, these kinds of mistakes make me love doing my job:

Intrepid Lighting in vForge

I did all of the in-engine lighting for Intrepid. As the art lead, and without a dedicated art director, the job went to me. It was a bit of a struggle, since I did a lot of guessing and working from the heart, because I don't really have the background for lighting. It was cool working in vForge with the deferred lighting, since I could make changes, and see them instantly in-game. Here's a bunch of shots of the level we had made:

 

 

 

 

It's weird, because after a time, I really couldn't tell how it looked, and even today (a week later), I can't read if it looks good or not.  With an animation, I can come back to it in a day or two, and I'll know what needs fixing; but when it came to this kind of thing, it did not come as easily.  I suppose that's why I'm an animator first.

Intrepid Cave Models

For funsies, here are some of the cave wall models I did for Intrepid.  They are all multi-sided (two sides of each being shown), so they can create some pretty cool silhouettes from very few modular pieces.  Click on 'em to show a bigger picture.

Rigging a Corgi

While on Intrepid, one of the jobs I was tasked with (or really, tasked myself with) was to rig and animate our four-legged main character, Tank the corgi.  I wanted to challenge myself, never having worked with a quadruped before.  It's challenge of the rig and animation was also what kept me sane during the harder weeks, because really, I loved every minute of it.

It was interesting to say the least.  I didn't model the character, and we didn't have the time or manpower to iterate, so there were a lot of little things I had to roll with.  One of the hardest parts was the muscles of the leg, where it connects to the chest-area.  This probably won't come as a big surprise to any dog-lovers, or anyone who's animated dogs before.  But getting that to work in the rig took a lot of studying and tweaking before my corrective joints worked on what I had.

I've also included here several resources I used for animation reference, for the benefit of myself in a future project, or anyone else who might grace this page.  Not included is the Edward Muybridge book for animals (which actually was of only limited benefit, due to it's physical, not digital, nature) and any reference that I personally took.

The Thundering Herd (slow motion running)
Goro the corgi slow motion recordings (there are several with this dog that were great reference)
Dog Normal and Abnormal Gait study
Line Test Journals - dog slow walk animation reference
Line Test Journals - how to key dogs walk animation notes

Working on a Different Video Game

I am sad to say that the game I was working on, Intrepid, was cut.  Out of the five games, four were green-lit, and ours was cut.  It came as a surprise to us, as well as a number of our peers; but it's not like we would ever not count on passing through.

This isn't the first time I've had to deal with losing a project.  I've walked this path before, and in a successful career, it certainly won't be the only time.  It's funny, because I was saying, on the chance we might get cut, I'd take it on the chin, and move on.  But I was surprised to see how much I cared about it when the time came.  To be honest, it wasn't even the game I was sad about losing, it was the team.  We had one of the closest teams in the cohort, and a number of people put our game as the game they would want to be a part of, and I'd like to think that's largely because of our culture.

Perhaps a bittersweet ending to a project I poured so much of my time and heart into, but part of being an artist is developing a thick skin and staying flexible.

I don't want this all to sound sad, though.  As I said, I need to move on, and I'm already ready to do that.  The game I had worked on previously, Grapple, was green-lit, and I was put on that team as the Lead Animator, and with several more talented people that came from Intrepid.

Over the next few days, I'll upload the work I've done for Intrepid.  I had to wear quite a few hats during that project, including quite a few that didn't quite fit me, but as the lead, I had to pick up where others could not.  I will say it was definitely enlightening to be out of my element.  After all, as Randy Pausch has said, experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.  And while I didn't get much out of the project as portfolio pieces, that was two grueling months (40 hour weeks, on top of classes) that I'd never give back.