Grapple - Amina Enemy Takedown

Here is a shot I've been working on for Grapple.  Amina, the protagonist of the game, is equipped with a grappling hook that she can use to grab onto buildings and enemies.  When grappling an enemy from the back, she goes into a takedown animation.

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.

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.

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.

Working on a Video Game

Usually I'd accompany all of my posts with pictures, but this can be an exception.  Today, not only was Grapple chosen as one of the five games to continue production, I was selected as the lead artist of another game, called Intrepid.  Needless to say, it's pretty exciting, and I'll be looking forward to the next months.  We have 2 months (starting January) to prove to the faculty that the game is worth making, and if we get greenlit, we get the next 6 months to develop it.  Pretty cool stuff.

Grapple Concepts

Matte paintings I made for a game called Grapple, to be presented to the FIEA faculty and students as a potential 8-month production.  I used a combination of photographs and digital painting.