Development Work

During The Summer - Maya

During the Summer I worked on quite a few animations as during this time I was interested in working in the film industry as a Character Animator while aiming for a 16+ target audience with my animations.

As it was the first animation I had created during the break as I was trying to look for inspiration for a potential animation while also looking for a competition to participate in. I chose to animate this dance video as I saw it while scrolling through 'TikTok' and saw the dance challenge, as I hadn't animated a dance in a while I chose to do this to refresh my animation skills after taking quite a break for my body and mental state to recover due to a lot of lack of sleep.

As I was working on this animation, I started working from the bottom upwards while trying to get the key poses from the reference and slowly adding more and more as time went by until I was able to accomplish the animation that is shown above.

Another animation I chose to do is a recreation of the short scene from Jackie Chan's movie 'Drunken Master' a I thought that it would be a good reference.

The Jackie Chan inspired animation was created as a way for me to test out the dynamic of timing and I thought the reference I used was perfect for that, the animation itself surprisingly did not take too long and my main focuses with this particular animation were the timing and the body mechanics.

For my first draft of this animation, I believe that this was a good start to what I was aiming for but as I later continue to look at the animation I notice some imperfections I may not have noticed initially which is what lead to me choosing to reach out to someone in the industry to receive feedback.

(Feedback and updated version is in the 'Industry Feedback' section.)

For this particular animation, I was trying to recreate a snippet of one of the famous scenes from the movie 'Rush Hour 3', the reference I used is shown below:

I started to create a simple stage for the scene which was created by simply using two 'polygon cubes' and used 'boolean' -> 'difference' to create the basic layout and later added colour to the stage for the animation which is shown below.

I chose not to go into too much detail with the set and create a very basic set as my main focus for this animation was the facial expressions of one of the two characters as well as showing from two different angles that captures the clear height different between the two characters just like the reference footage shows.

Shown below was the work in progress of this particular animation so far, as much as I had enjoyed the process and of creating the facial expressions specifically on the 'aang rig' which came from the Agora asset page, I later on abandoned the animation as I felt like I was moving away from what I initially want my profession to be which is simply a 'shot animator' for biped rigs.

I continued working with facial animations as it is one aspect of animation I genuinely enjoy since it brings life to a character if you were to add facial expressions to the character animation than if you were to create a shot animation with a character that does have the abilities to create facial animations but choose not to animate the face, the character would have a doll-like, lifeless feel than if it was animated.

Although I forgot to time myself on how long this animation took, I know that it did not take much time to do as the main focus was on facial expressions specifically.

Gradually around this point is where I made a shift and decided to go from the film industry to the games industry as unintentionally, the animations I have been so focused on creating, in additions to my interests of enjoying action scenes in movies, made me graduate towards the games industry to be a gameplay animator.

For this animation, I was mainly focused on the body movement of this particular reference. Shown below is the blocking of this particular animation:

I decided to take a break from the animation then come back to it at a later point and refined the animation a bit which did not take that long.

I chose to try and do a punch animation with this toph rig and was trying to aim for a power up punch, the animation process is shown below.

As I tried to adjust the animation over and over again, I was slightly annoyed at the fact that a particular part of the rig, the upper spine, would not ben in the way I wanted it to which in my own personal opinion, left the upper part of the body looking stiff which did not give the punch as much emphasis as I wanted it to.

As shown above, I chose to render the shot using 'Arnold' in Maya but it unfortunately came out much darker than I initially expected.

Shown below I chose to do a simple run cycle and the inspiration for the run cycle animation shown below were the runs from the anime 'Naruto' and from the game character 'Wraith' in 'Apex Legends' I thought it was an interesting type of run to do since it was a type of run that popped into my head.

The reference I had used for the run cycle is shown below:

As surprising as it is, it was actually difficult to find real life footage of this particular run for reference since most of the potential references I found either showed half of the body, did not have a steady camera or it was just simply an animated version.

Walk cycle - Blender

Since it was one of my objectives, I chose to look into the software 'Blender' for an alternate option and as a test I tried to do a simple walk cycle with a 'Juri rig' I found.

The entire animation process itself did not take long at all and it took a bit of time to get used to the controls as I had 'Maya' open at the same time while working on something else and would accidentally use mix up the controls by accidentally using 'Maya' controls in 'Blender' and 'Blender' controls in 'Maya'.

While I was experimenting on Blender and exploring the software I was able to export and render the animation which took about: 3hrs 25 mins, from when I timed it.

Lego Animations - Maya

As I had decided to participate in the most recent 'Animchallenge' on the Agora website which had a theme about Lego and provided rigs.

Before I decided to work on the actual animation for the competition I decided to do a quick short shot animation as a test run with the rig which is shown below:

I then moved on to the blocking process and spline process of the short animation I had planned for the 'Lego Challenge' which is shown below, I chose to animate a simple run into a flip.

Soon after I moved onto the polishing process which did not particularly take long but I continuously kept adjusting it till I felt it was ok enough for the competition.

(the complete polished piece is on the client/ competition section.)

After Submissions - Free time

Showcased below will be the animations I decided to create with my time after Submissions.

Unreal Engine - Animation

After using Unreal Engine for rendering my project for my FMP, I decided to test out animating in Unreal Engine, to help myself understand the concept of animating in unreal engine I decided to look at some tutorials on how to animate in unreal engine which made it quite simple for me to understand.

After looking at some of the videos I decided to put what I've seen and learned to the test by making a simple shot animation to test out the controls with this particular rig made for Unreal Engine.

As I did this quick and very basic animation for a test, I found the process of animating within Unreal Engine quite pleasant and encouraging to do more animations within Unreal Engine in the future.