During pre-production, in preparation for rigging the centaur character, I undertook various rigging tests so that I knew the inner workings of the rig before production began. Each test tried something new with developing my knowledge and the skills I needed to create the centaur rig.



Here I developed my understanding of the IK systems by building a set of IK arms with rotation and elbow controls. Overall they worked fairly well and the skinning was quite effective and managed to get nice deformations around the wrists and elbow. The next step to progress from this is to build in FK controls as well as IK to allow animators the flexibility and freedom to choose what method they see fit.



These tests worked around building the horse part of the centaur's legs focusing on the front and rear. Overall they work effectively but further work around the knee joints will be required to create nicer deformations. As it stands they create an unnatural pose that, when animated, may require a lot of tweaking and fiddling to work.


The last tests focused on the muscle systems on the arms and legs. I decided to create human limbs rather than the ones necessarily used in the centaur for simplicity and greater understanding of how muscle systems work within the human body.

To grasp a better understanding of the Fae character I created a couple sketches with some little variations and changes. As a result, I feel it has aided in my development of the character now able to distinguish between his different movement styles, poses and designs.

Still going on with the centaur rig, will have something put together in next few days to show but for now I thought I'd post up a bit more pre-production. 

This is a little animatic put together for the Fae's attack animation. Generally I think it works fairly well and gets the idea of the forward thrusting strike motion but some further work on the return motion would probably be ideal. I am hoping this plays a valuable part of my actual animation and has really given me an insight into combat animation.



004 Clean Attack Animatic from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.

Leading on from my caricatured designs, I created a few of them using the Morpheus rig testing out how they would appear in CG working within the limits of the rig itself. Mostly, I managed to replicate the core ideas and themes of each character fairly well having to saturate the exaggerated nature of a few of them for a more workable design yet still retain the character's presence and appearance.

I am into production now working on the centaur rig so thought I'd continue to post up the work I completed for pre-production.

These are a couple of caricature designs I made as concepts for the character in my short acting piece. Originally I was aiming at creating an older male character, probably around late 50s, but continued to experiment with different ages, personalities and shapes. In the end, I have decided to create a character with a blend of all this features using the Morpheus rig in Maya.

Still keeping busy with all my uni work, I'm currently working on a rig for a character in our upcoming game project, I'll post that up in the next few weeks once it's finished but so far its looking good, much better than any previous rigs I've done!

This week though I thought I'd show off some more of my pre-production work. These are a couple of little facial expression sheets I did for a character I'm hoping to animate in the coming weeks using the Morpheus rig. The idea was to have a fairly caricatured guy who's a tad on edge so is fits in with my dialogue choice.

There's also one of my animatics I did for the death animation of another character I'm animating as part of our game project. So far I'm fairly happy with the idea but I may push a little more in the final thing to really sell his dramatic fall.




Death Animatic from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.

A very brief little animatic I created for my single character acting piece I will be starting in the coming months. I just wanted to throw down some rough movements and poses to get a better feel for the character as a whole playing with subtle changes in the way he holds his hands and grasps the objects around him.

Below, I have included the piece of dialogue I will be animating to. I chose it because I feel it supplies me with a lot of the different elements that can make up a great bit of dialogue - the subtle nuances in voice, the long thoughtful pauses and soft yet sinister voice which hides a hidden intent. With all these elements together I think it provides a great canvas for my animation allowing me a lot of creative freedom with character design, environment and overall acting choices.

As part of my production I will be animating the Bark Basher character (modelled by Fen Evetts) throughout the game providing a range of different weights and movements to best portray the character.

The Bark Basher is a natural predator that acts on instinct and becomes the final boss character for the player to defeat. He uses his two huge 'shields' to protect himself from attacks whilst also using them as battering rams to deliver powerful blows to the player. With this in mind I began to concept a couple poses and action sheets the character may take whilst in combat - which is where the majority of my animations will reside.

They are very rough drawings and in hindsight diverting more time to cleaning their perspective and the weight of the character would have been ideal so as to better portray the character I am trying to deliver and the actions I wish for him to take.

These are a few of the thumbnail sheets I created for Pre-Production. They play around with some of the ideas I had for the Fae's animations so looking specifically at the attack, death and damage animations I would be dealing with. As it turns out, most of these animations are now being done by others and the overall design of the character has changed since then but these little sketches still provided a good grounding and basis for my work and helped develop into some more interesting designs.