Game ANimation [Month 14]

The secondary class for this month was game animation, which was the first time we studied animation for games. All the other animation classes were set up for movies, and since games don't always display proper timing it was a lot of fun to see how to deal with those situations and keep the characters response times up with the player instead of the player having to wait for the character to perform a proper animation cycle. The other class this month ate up my time

Project 1: walk cycles showing personality
Walk cycles are important ... because to get around you either have to run or walk .. duh? Given a character personality, copy that walk cycle believably.


Project 2: redo the walk cycle with the character the instructor modeled and rigged, then make a run cycle with the same character. It became apparent rather quickly that while a good animator, he wasn't ready for modeling/rigging/weighting his own work.






Project 3: make an attack cycle for a creature that might live under ground and attack people or animals that might walk by.



Project 4: make an attack pose cycle for Frank, something like what you might see in a 3rd person shooter or action game.



Project 5: jump! When you tap the jump button, you want to see an instant result. So in game animation there's no anticipation for the jump.




Project 6: light attack before you make a heavy attack

Project 7: heavy attack that leads out of the light attack. This would happen in a game if I press the heavy attack button directly after the light attack ... stacking the commands one after the other.




Project 8: build a game rig on Frank, even though his geometry is messed up and when you try to animate him he becomes disfigured. :'(

Character Animation [Month 11]

So this month is another one class month, and true to form there was a lot of work to be done in this class. Still, I was excited to finally get to the dreaded CAn class everyone talks about in dreaded whispered tones. The point of this class was to reinforce previously learned basic principles of animation touched on in 2DA and FOA, and then to move on to more technical issues like a proper bipedal walk and how emotions should be shown mostly through the body instead of through the face. This class was challenging for two reasons: when I get rolling it's hard for me to stop and as a result I was told to start over projects many times, this is mostly a technical class so if you are trying to show too much of an artistic eye you're probably going to fail. There's some good and bad in there, I'm not trashing Full Sail, I'm only saying this is why I had such a hard time trying to get through the course.

Project 1: silhouette poses that show strong line of action/emotion
The goal of the project was to get into the habit of finding the strong pose to the camera, as this is one of the key components to strong animation.


Project 2: juice box fun!
Show what animation skills you -do- have, so that you can build on them from here on up.


Project 3: basic bipedal walk
Using the knowledge learned from silhouette poses and juice box, then add that to the walk cycle learned in class and see what you can do.


Project 4: emotional change
Take everything else you've learned so far, and give it character based on the character profile you built in class. Show that the scene begins in the middle.


Project 5: lip syncing to an audio clip
Now for the final project, take everything you've learned from before and apply them to lip syncing techniques learned in class. Make another character profile and a back story to help explain the scene.
[Edit: - the sound seems to be off now that I uploaded this file, I apologize for blogger lag!]



As with any project, we did a lot of pre-pro. Here are some of the videos of my .. practice ....
Can you tell which is which?

1:


2:


3:


4: