Finally, Production!

So, from the 16th we finally moved onto production of our Major Project, and our game, 'ECHOES'. There's been a lot of preparing up to this point so it's nice to finally get onto making what we have been planning for awhile.

So far I have been animating the girl wave/beckon for our game (I showed some pre-production of it a couple of posts back). After speaking to my tutor, it was decided it looked more natural for her to put her hand on the tree and she peeked around, before doing the hand gesture. The only problem this caused was switching between FK to IK, as I couldn't get the poses to line up properly, so they would snap between frames, which, obviously, didn't look good. So In the end, I re-did the animation with just IK arms, as the motion of the arm follows the hand in this case, so even though the hand was in the air, I could also get away with animating it this way easily.

It's obviously not completed yet, but this is how it looks thus far.

End of Pre-Production...Part 2

Ending yesterday's post (And ending Pre-Production once and for all!), the final thing I was working on for 'Echoes' was the rigging of the boss character, the Bark Basher.

To go ahead with the rigging in production, I needed to make a good plan of where the joints of the rig would go, and how they would move. So to do this I made a basic test rig to try out almost a beta version of the rig, and also planned where they joints and the controls which will be used will go, into the artist's turnaround.

Over-all, I found this part fun times! Here's a look at.

 My rigging plan on the Artist's turnarounds. Turnaround and design by Fen Evetts!

So...That's pre-production finally over....yay!

Onto the fun stuff! ANIMATING.

End of Pre-production

Pre-Production finally ended today (We got a 2 day extension). So today and tomorrow I'll be uploading some more stuff I did for pre-production while we begin working on Production from tomorrow.

So, onto the last bouts of the pre-production!

These were the storyboards I did for the 10 second 'Dragon Cinematic' for our game 'ECHOES'. The idea was for the main character to walk into shot as the scene will play mid-game. As he walks in, the dragon will fly past him and land on a tree, giving a roar.

I put the storyboards shots together to make this rough animatic GIF to give a better sense to the timing and motion of the cinematic.

Asides from the storyboards and the rough cinematic, I decided to do a (very) rough CG pre-viz of the cinematic, to get a slightly better reference of how the scene will be placed, timed and animated.

I also repeated this process fro the Bark Basher intro cinematic, the boss character for our game.

Looking at Horse's for the Centaur Character.

Another character I will be animating within the game is the Centaur enemy, a half horse, half human character. I will be animating his walk forward and his damage in-game animations. For this I have been researching horse's, naturally, to see how they walk. I've managed to create a nice animatic folowing some thumbnails of horse walk poses I have done, to get a better understanding of the poses of the legs, and the up and down of the body.

 

These are my research sheets, looking into horse anatomy for muscle movement, and reference of horse's walking.

Deadline is approaching! Gah!

Researching for the Boss Character...The Bark Basher.

For part of our game. 'ECHOES', one of my colleagues is making the boss character for the game, nicknamed; the 'Bark Basher'. He's going to have heavy bark shield like arms, whilst having a crab's body. I'm having quite an involvement with this character as I will be rigging him, doing a couple of in-game animations for him (the walk forward and death) and will be animating him in one of the cinematics.

Since he has such heavy arms, I've decided to look at Gorilla's for reference as they move predominantly with their arms, as the BB (Bark Basher) will.

 Below are the rough animatics I made as rough pose reference for the BB's walk forward, with the Gorilla as front arm reference and the spider walk cycle as his legs.