Senior Portfolio Spring Semester

Final Blog post

This week I began to block out my rapier attack animation.  The reference I am using has shots from all angles so I am able to reference it very easily.  I do still need to find a rapier model to attach to the hand to correctly position the hands and rotations.

Right now I have blocked out the initial thrust with the rapier, I still need to work on the settle/ recovery from the attack which will feature a flourish before sheathing the rapier.

The rapier is a step in the opposite direction compared to the great word animations that I was making earlier in the semester, which are very exaggerated movements compared to a rapier that has very fast and precise movants.  I think having the practice for working on both of them was vey helpful for my portfolio and future projects.

Overall throughout the semester I did not do as much as I wanted to get done, I had many animations planned for the semester, but a lack of motivation for some or other classes overtook my time and effort for this class.

I wanted to make multiple attack cycles for my sword but lost motivation on that animation due to controls not working as well as I think having the sword scaled so large made the weight of the animation feel awkward.

While I did feel like I did not do enough for this semester compared to my plans which had a very large amount of animations, I think the ones that I have completed were very well made.  I wish that I had not lost so much time working on animations that I did not like the result of and switched away from before I finished.

I was very happy with the walk cycle and idle animations that I finished for this semester, and I believe that the rapier attack and flourish will also turn out very well!.  There were a few issues that I ran into with the walk cycle while trying to make certain parts of the animation feel more dynamic, but despite that, leaving them to how they were let the animation stand well enough on its own without me fussing over it more than I needed to.

If I had more time this semester I would have allocated more time for my animations specifically for this class compared to the animations I had for my other classes or projects I was working on.  Other than that I believe that I simply need more practice with parenting and attaching objects to the rig to allow it to be used in a way that feels realistic and comprehensive.

Week 13

For this week I finished up the final adjustments for the walk cycle and have decided to move onto a new animation.

For my next animation I will do a rapier flourish and sheathing. I have reference shot for my animation but I will see if I am able to finish the animation before the end of the semester alongside my greatsword attack.

Week 12

 This week I took the suggestions from last week's critique to flush out the walk cycle, I want to start a short animation to finish before the end of the semester, and I will be searching for Ideas for this week and possibly finishing up my sword swing animation now that I have had time to take a break and come back to it.

Week 11

For the week I applied the suggestions that I was given in class this previous week, one of the bigger changes that I made was changing the timing on the foot movement, to make the cycle more unique and less symmetrical.  I also lowered the COG and adjusted poses to make the character look as if they are exerting more effort to pull the sword behind them.

The main issues that I struggled with with implementing these changes were the adjustments to the timings to keep the movements smooth as well as the having to reverse some of the positions of limbs.

Week 10

For this week I continued to work on the walk cycle, working past the block out that I made last week, I've been working on adding additional poses and working on the curves in my graph editor.  My main issues when I moved over to splining was the transitions between certain poses that I had to either adjust or add other poses to help smooth out the movements.  My main goal with this walk cycle is to give the notion that the sword is extremely heavy and needing a great deal of strength to pull behind the model.

My goal is to cleanup and finish the animation in this week to move onto another animation that I can finish before the end of the semester.

Week 9

This week I decided to take a break from my attack animation that I've been working on to help refresh myself with working on a new animation.  I wanted to keep the rig and weapon that I have been using to keep in the style of overexaggerating the weight.  I began blocking out the walk cycle that I decided to work on.  The character is going to be dragging the sword behind them, scraping it along the ground.

I currently only have the poses blocked out but am glad with the progress that I currently have, especially with how I want the character to feel as if they are struggling to drag the sword to an extent.

Week 8

For this week I adjusted the timing, and weight of how the character handles the sword, I made the cog as well as the feet move forward earlier to emphasize the weight of the sword.  I also adjusted the drop of the sword to make the character feel as if they are actually being pulled down by the weight.  I continued to work on the arc of the sword to help it move in a more natural arc.

I plan on working on adjusting the feet and cog movement to be smoother.

Week 7

This week I did not do too much with my animations.  I will be working on splining when I am able to work more on the animations and hopefully be close to finished after spring break.

Week 6

    This week, I worked on fixing up the constraints on the sword once again, I now am able to make the hands rotate separately while still being constrained to the sword to help avoid awkward wrist positions that I would not be able to fix dur to my current constraints.  I continued to refine the posing on my sword swing, adjusting the COG to help better fit the new positioning as well as performing more weight shifts to make the sword feel much heavier.

Week 5

This week I worked on the first attack, blocking out how the poses would work, as well as still attempting to wrangle the constraints with the sword, switching the hand that the sword was constrained to worked out very well for helping with the positioning, however I am still using the IK arms.  I will continue to work in IK for now, to see how I can do with the first attack, but I may switch over to FK later on.  The timing on the attack is still mediocre at best at the moment, however with more work on the posing, offsets, and shortening the animation, I believe that the animations will be very clean.

I also made a quick idle animation to cycle, this idle will be the starting and returning poses after each set of attacks, similar to how games have a settle back into the idle from most different attacks.

As I continue to work on theses animations I will find more opportunities to shoot reference with my sword to actually time out my animations as well as have a reference with semi-proper weight.

Week 4

This week I was focused on getting the constraints for the weapon properly as well as some posing for the starting/ idle pose that I had planned to use at the start of the attack and what the character returns to at the end of the attack or chain of attacks. 

 I like how the constraints are working at the moment, however the constraints are currently in IK which doesnt feel good for how I want to swing the sword, so I plant on switching over to FK to try out how the animations would work with the arms in FK.  I found some reference that I can use for weighting and combat styles from FromSoft games, such as elden ring, Dark souls, Bloodborne, as well as some fun attack chains from Genshin Impact.

Fixing the constraints to feel smooth and not have to fight them when animating will be my main focus this week as well as working more on posing and hoping to shoot my own reference when the rain clears up.

Week 3

This week I was looking through the job list for the resume and cover letter project, luckily I had my resume from last semester so I was able to reuse the base of that and then adjust it to have newer things such as new programs that I have gained experience in since last semester.  I found a listing for a studio that I have played and watched some of their games, Hazelight, so I filled out my cover letter for them. The listing was asking for a bit more experience than I currently have but I hoped that my work over the summer could help make up for some of the time that I didn't have in industry experience.  I was very happy to see that I had experience in most of the programs and skills that wanted or were additional things that they would be happy to see.

Other than That I searched for more models and rigs to use in my animations for the semester, I do still need to find a place to shoot reference with the sword.

Week 2

This week I we didn't do too much in class other than talk about our resumes, so for this week I went over my own resume and updated it with the newer information that I have, I do want to update my portfolio on art station with more projects that I have done over the previous semester.

I also went searching for rigs to use in my projects, I found a model of spider-Gwen from Into the Spiderverse, which I will be using for my first set of animations if the testing with it goes well.

With this week concluding I plan to begin my animations this week as well as work on the cover letter for the assignment.  I still do not know the due dates to I will try to have it finished by the time they are announced.

Week 1

 For this class I intend to complete multiple projects, focusing on movements and over exaggeration.  I would like to try to do more action and movement based animations rather than focusing on dialogue like I did last semester.  I believe that this will be a good semester for my portfolio as well as honing my skills with movements and weight.

My main focus for the first few animations will focus on attack animations, cycles, and having attacks that go back into the idle stance or merge into new attacks and combos. 

Set one:

• The first set of animations will focus on using a greatsword/ buster sword.

• Very oversized and heavy sword with heavy attacks and lots of struggle behind swinging the sword.

• Using animation layers to merge back into the idle stance or into the next animation.

• The animations should only take a few weeks

• The things that may take a bit of time are working on the in-betweens or merging into combos

Set two:

• The Set will be focused on movement animations

• Different emotions displayed from walks or runs, some parkour jumps over obstacles and pits

• The animations should take upwards of about a month, especially depending on how many different actions I decide to do.

Set three:

• This set should be focused on attack animations again, this time using a sword or rapier.

• Swift and dexterous movements, very fast, much more precise attacks rather than broad movements.

• This once again should be a quicker set, maybe a few weeks because I do not know if I want to try to merge between attacks like in the first set.