I kind of miss labeled the animation “Idle” below this one. It’s more of an animation to break up the standard idle animation (this one). Looking over Blizzard’s naming scheme for World of Warcraft I’m now calling this one “Stand1″ and the other will be “Stand2″.
I got some great feedback from Kiel Figgins about the run and “idle” animations that I’ll be taking into account and going back over those two and tighten them up. I need to make a really solid reel if I want to get some serious responses from the studios.
Finally got around to finishing this Crow Shaman character I’ve had sitting around. I completely redid the body mesh and I much happier with it. Also spent last week doing the textures for everything. I didn’t worry about trying to make a super condensed “game” version with all the UVs on one map. I’m just having fun with this guy and wanted something cool to animate next.
I showed this one around a bit and one comment rang out about the character needing more up and down. Now, I was following the Richard Williams method of runs in that they generally do not have as much up and down as a walk. I applied that principle to this run, but something funny happened, it lost the weight. It drove home the point that there are just guidelines, not rules to animation. There may not be much up and down in a standard run, but with this very cartoony character it needed that large up and down to sell the weight presented in the rest of the body.
Well, I must say adding that larger disparity in the Y-Axis really accomplished that feeling I was going for. Thanks go out to Eric Cerda and Brendan Body for their keen eye for motion.
There are a couple of bits of my current reel that I want to replace so I’m working on some new stuff. This is me trying to get more acting into my animation. I’m going for a kind of awkward geek run.
I wanted to show you the back because I really like the secondary motion on the backpack. Which there was a lot of that on this particular character so it made it a lot of fun to do. Which all of that brings a lot of life to this little guy. Thanks to Keil Figgins for providing free rigs for us animators to use.
My wife and brother both felt that the mace still didn’t have enough weight. So I went back over it and really payed a lot of attention to how it moves and how he’s moving it around. Now it feels super heavy to me.
