Final Cutscene Body Language WIP

Office Cinematic _ Facial Animation

Facial Animation Update. Office Cinematic is almost done! Just some touch ups left.

Office Cinematic _ Body Language

I'VE DONE IT.

I was actually running behind on this animation, because of so many things. There were entire days were I couldn't work on this cinematic at all, even though I had scheduled myself to work on it then. I was forced to fudge the schedule a bit. Tomorrow I'll have to finish up the facial animations and expressions and polish up anything else that needs polishing up.

And then, shockingly, I will be done with the office cinematic, come Tuesday. 

That said, I was INCREDIBLY bad at keeping my blog up to date with my work. Pretty much since the last update I was working on this, and finally managed to finish it on time! I can say with confidence now that I can keep to my schedule. :D

Plushy Knight Opening Sequences

Here is the finished animation with facial animation and some lighting and sound. At this point, the animation itself leaves my hands and goes to Scott for lighting, rendering and compositing! Once that's done, I can put it up on my portfolio! :D

Plushy Knight Opening Sequences - Almost Done!

...Phew. Facial animation for the 3 scenes are done. Not complete of course, but given my time constraits, i really ought to move on. I've still got cloth to do for two characters and all...

Seeing this all together now makes me think i might need to change the camera shots on that last scene...

Anyway! I've learned something today. The difference between straight forward animation and pose to pose. For the longest time I never really understood the point of straight ahead animation, and that;s because I've always animated using passes and then going back through and adjusting timing and the poses themselves as I animated. But when it comes to facial animation, going through with passes makes the process more tedious than it would be. Especially when it comes to lip syncing, it's just far easier to forget the frame count and focus purely on hitting the expression and mouth shapes on the first go. I'm not sure what it is, but the way the face and the body moves, how they move and the kinds of motions they make, are distinct. Might be because of the fact that the body uses muscles to move bones whereas the face uses muscle to move skin. Who knows.

Of course, that said, a part of me isn't too fond of straight ahead animating. Because it's like taking a drawing and starting with the upper corner and just drawing EVERYTHING. No sketch, no gesture, just jump right into the detail. Sometimes it'll look good, sometimes it won't, and it's just harder to pick up on exactly why something doesn't look right.

All my own thoughts just from reading up on a chapter on pose to pose vs straight ahead animation in a How to Cheat in Maya book. Which I'll need to get myself one of these days...

Sanctuary Island Cinematic

Still a bit late on this. I have a tendency to put off playblasts until beyond the last minute. But this lil cinematic just before gameplay is Body Language Done. All that's left is to do facial animation and some adjustments to the title sequence. Next post will have all 3 animations with facial animation and polish up.

The biggest question is how I'm going to render this out for my portfolio. I think I might just set up some simple lights and render it out in Viewport 2.0 in maya, since you can still get some good results in that. Which means I'll have to set aside some time in order to get that done. I'm probably going to be working on that all weekend.