Demo Reel Clip #3 - Attack/Knockdown

During my second class of portfolio creation, I worked on three different assets for my demo reel, one was the walk I talked about before, the second one was an attack and knockdown animation, the reason for including this in the demo reel was to show off my ability to do shorter game friendly assets. Usually these scenes have two characters in them, one attacking and one getting hit, but I wanted to make the same guy do both in a way I thought was kind of unique and humorous. This is what I came up with after about a week and a half.

I started with a few key poses, but then I added a few more in-betweens for some faster motions to make sure I had the timing right, and to see if it looked alright in the camera angle. I also wanted to have a short idle at the beginning that was reminiscent of Street Fighter. When it comes to attacks and knockdowns, they are some of the masters. Even this early on I wanted to animate the sandbag, even if it was some simple stepped keys, because I wanted to get an idea of where the bag was headed, and how I can adjust the timing, because I didn't want too much time in between the attack and knockdown, so this was a good way to measure it early on.

For the next milestone I went into mostly auto-tangent, and tried to experiment with some other poses while the sandbag was still in the air. I was considering having the character hunch over and heavily pant while out of breath, but in the end this didn't really suit the tough guy personality I was trying to go for, also there wasn't enough time before the sandbag came coming down to get a good read on the action, and I didn't want to keep it in the air forever, because that wasn't the point of the animation.

The next milestone is when I really started to get the motions you see in the final shot. A lot of it was carefully in-betweening the very fast motions that the character goes through, especially around the impact of the punching bag and making the fall a little less symmetrical, strengthening the appeal. I also added a quick 1 - 2 - punch while the bag is in the air, to keep the character aggressive, and so it gives him a reason to take his eyes off the bag and get hit in the first place.

By the end it was all subtleties and fixes. The biggest change was that I added facial animation, which added another layer of believability into this characters emotion. I also took the time to substitute in a sandbag with I simple little rig I created to give it a bit more motion and follow through on the way up and down. Lets take another look at how the final shot turned out.

This shot certainly had its unique challenges, and was fun one to work on. See you all next time when I will be covering the creature run cycle I created for my reel.

Demo Reel Clip #2 - Walk Cycle

For my second demo reel asset I wanted to do a walk cycle, but not just any cycle, one that made the character look happy and confident. I felt like the double bounce walk was perfect for this. I got a chance to get some nice big swing in the arms, and keep the chest out for that overwhelming confidence effect. This was the final result.

This animation took me about four days to polish it to its final state. I think having a strong base really established made my job a lot easier in the long run, and made tweaking things very enjoyable. In cycles I like to start by making sure all my number in Maya are nice and rounded, as well as symmetrical on both sides. I'm very left brain in that regard, and if I need to go back and make changes to slit up the symmetry later, I still can. This was my first milestone, this is going to auto-tangent right after establishing the contacts, downs, passings, and ups.

From here, because of the strong base poses, much of the changes were more subtle and mechanical ones, like adding movement in the hair, swing the feet to look more like actual walks, and messing around with the timing of the arm swings. Alone, these changes don't always sound like much, but when all layered together, that's when you start to see the changes.

I really enjoyed this asset because I love creating cycles. Its amazing to see how they can be repurposed to many different situations in film and in games. I'm also amazed by how much personality you can fit into a couple loopable frames of animation. Now let's take another look at the final shot, with all this background information in mind. See you next time!