Character Dialogue

Overall I feel this project was perhaps my strongest allowing me prioritise facial and lip-sync animation above body mechanics to produce a character driven piece that focuses on some subtle details to convey the desired emotions.

Throughout the course of this project the greatest learning curve has been understanding lip-sync workflow and facial animation and I believe I have taken great strides in further understanding this process. Whilst I still have much to learn, I feel that this project has put me on the right path to understanding a greater level of animation whose applications can be applied to a variety of uses both within film as well as video games.

If more time were available I would have liked to have used more solid moving holds throughout the animation especially on the areas where the character looks into distance and towards the camera. Further work here would have really enhanced the overall feel of the animation and effectiveness of the design.

Echoes Animations

The animations I created for the Echoes encompassed a large variety of characters of varying sizes, personalities and designs including the Fae player character, Bark Basher, Centaur and Genevieve.

Some of the animations turned out more successful than others due to minor rig issues with the centaur as well as some of the limitations when working with video games. But overall, the project gave me a good grounding in body mechanics animations and further enhanced my knowledge and understanding of animation within video games.

The most interesting character to work with was the Bark Basher whose unique 'shield-arm' designs provided a complex problem to overcome for animation but also proved a enjoyable design for us to manage.

With more time I would rework some of the Fae attack animations to create snappier, cleaner arcs and motions that would work more effectively in-game. As it stands I feel they are too slow and whilst playing the game the player can often find themselves waiting for the attack combo to finish rather than enjoy the motion of the animation.




Rigging

As part of this project I creating a number of different rigs for different purposes. The centaur character is the main enemy character the Winter environment of the game with a variety of different animations including trots, canters, walks, attacks and death animations to name a few.

The rig as a while has worked on a base level giving animators enough options to create basic animations using a simple, clean set of controls and features. But if more time were available I would  get back in and fix the IK/FK switches. Using just IK has been fine for the Bow carrying hand and will certainly be useful when constraining the arrow to the hand but trying to achieve secondary motion has been a pain for my colleagues. Other than that though, he is generally fine to animate with and the amount I've learnt from doing this can only make my future rigs considerably better. 
My other rig was the human head, which used a simple joint layout with exploration into blendshapes and other features. I created it to further my understanding of facial animation since I was unable to explore it with the centaur rig I also felt my experience with facial animation with my first project would aid in my development and understanding of what was necessary from the rig. 

Overall I felt it was a successful exercise in learning more about rigging furthering my understanding of how blendshapes work within the rig creating a system whereby moving the mouth controls would also animate the cheek bones independently and without animator supervision. To further enhance the rig though I would like to include more features for the mouth and eyes like blink controls or set driven shapes as I feel this would greatly increase the viability of the rig and it's usefulness for animation.