2020 is no doubt a heck of a year…wishing that I can do more, I wanted to have something to cheer people up so I made Skelly dance. Skelly was a character from Hades with a lot of personalities. What better way to celebrate Halloween then Skelly and his amazing dancing skills. I used whatever VO I found of Darren, since he voiced Skelly, and implemented what I thought would work on the video after the animation was done. The music would have been great if I could use the actual music but for copyright reasons, I used Hades soundtrack. The team approved of this animation before I posted it to the social network.
1100 followers
A few more hundred followers showed up in a few days following the previous post. This was late September. Another idea spark so I blocked out another animation to welcome incoming followers. This continued the theme of shattering ice wall.
800 followers
I started a Twitter account in Sept 2019. In the same month of 2020, one tweet from Supergiant Games’ Art Director, Jens sent hundred of new followers into my account. In the spirit of welcoming the followers, I blocked out a little animation using another one of Kiel Figgins rig…I have too many of his rigs. For this one, I did some voice over for the Ogre, I had fun making funny sounds.
I enjoy blocking out ideas since its just pure joy for me. It was just fun to have a reason to do something creative. The rock shatters were done with Maya bullet.
Rigging tool experiment 3
Continuing with the rest of the year goal to level up my rigging/modeling skills, with rigging goal to level up both manual and knowledge of using auto rigging tools, I created another 3D model. Still in September, I got to play a bit of a game called: ”Spiritfarer” from Thunder Lotus studio. It was a completely different feel from the previous violent games I played like The Last of Us 2 and Ghost of Tsushima. The pace was much calmer, there wasn’t violent, bloor or gore. I loved the 2D style, ofcourse in particular the main character Stella. Like my previous model I created this year, I started with sculpting in Zbrush and retopo in Maya. The challenge of this time was creating a better facial loop for animation and for the first time ever, sculpting hair. Both were not easy. I tried to use a hair sculpting tool and manual sculpting. When retopo in Maya, I tried to be mindful about the memory cost and kept the mesh as light as I can with my current modeling skill.
This time I experiment rigging with mGear again, I can’t recall what version was it but the main point was to see if there were any updates to the rig system that improved certain features that 2.52 lack (an old version we used at work) One of the tests to see deformation flexibility that I did was to pose out Stella hugging Aang (made by Rigstation) I thought it was perfect since Aang can visit the spirit world. Stella in the game is known for being a hugger. This was a perfect opportunity. I didn’t have time to do more than a couple of simple animations but nothing worth showing.
After this experiment, I started to realized something: It would take a lot more practices and training to get better at modeling/texturing. As much as I really enjoy doing it, I realized the skills are not as essential to my career as an animator. They are nice to have definitely but animation already require a lot of time and training to get good, splitting up the time that I do have began to feel not as beneficial. My animation skills still need to get better, which require more mileage, more time spend into it. I decided to to leave modeling/texture goals in the back log in order to focus on skills that will benefit my future more.
Rigging tool experiment 2
In September. following the experiment with Advance Rigging tool, I continued the quest to look for another auto rigger tool, perhaps something less than the $2000 price tags. I stumple across A.R.T (Animation & Rigging Tool) from Unreal itself. However, this has not been updated for several years. I downloaded a set of free character model asset from Unreal Marketplace by RocketArts to test out the rigging tool. The rigging process was straight forward although I have not figure out how to add twist bones to the wrist joints with the tool yet.
I tested out the deformation on the character by blocking out a multi jump spin to hero landing move with reference from this awesome guy. I added a tribute at the end. The tool came with animation picker, it also has quick selection set, IKFK matching among many useful features. Further testing to utilize the A.R.T tool easy export animaton to Unreal. I exported and tested the character to see him in the engine. Below video showed a playblast of the animation in Maya and in Unreal.
This was a great find and I hope to explore more. I mainly hope Unreal continue to support this tool. For now I moved on to see what other tools are available.
Rigging tool experiment 1: Avatar the last Air bender: Penguin
In August, I was still in reminiscing Avatar show having rewatching many episodes that I have rewatched several time already, I set out a goal to create another model/rig inspired from the show, this time it was the Penguin from the first episode of the first season.
I started with reference and blocked out in Zbrush.
Instead of sculpting everything in Zbrush first. I went straight into retopo in Maya. The goal was to revisiting old school box modeling aside from learning how to create good edge loop.
I created a very basic diffuse map in photoShop. There was definitely ugliness in here as texture and Uv stitching was something I’m still struggling with but for this purpose, it was fine. Next, with the goal of learning different auto riggers, this is because rigging myself manually would require a lot of time as I do not know how to create scripts for automation yet. On top of that, I was researching different auto rigger tool for my day job, I chose Advance Skeleton tool to rig the character up. The tool came with animation sets for testing deformation, I applied one of the walk animations and tweaked here and there to complete the animation test below.
I also rigged the face with Advance Skeleton but the result was not desirable as my edge loops setup were not so great. I was planning to release the rig for free but respecting the rule of Advance Skeleton, I could not release the rig if I don’t own the license for the tool. A $2000 license was a bit too steep of a price for me to acquire and so the thought of releasing this rig was put away. I learned a lot from the experiment. I am planning to revisit the project at another time but for now, it was time for me to move on.
Avatar the last Air bender
At the end of July, Rigstation released the free rig of Aang. Aang was a character from the beloved Nickelodeon show called :”Avatar: the last Airbender”. Being a big fan of the show, I was ecstatic to see the Aang rig but he didn’t come with anything else to accompany him and so, being inspired, I thought I should create his trusty glider staff and give it out for free as well.
Looking back now, there was some constraint issue with the way I did the space switching for the grip placement. I have plan to revisit and added the second glider staff that Aang used but this had been backlog since I have prioritize other goals.
Oni Takedown
After finishing The Last of Us II, another amazing game came out in July: Ghost of Tsushima. As usual, I was inspired! I have always enjoy open world games. The representation of the characters and the Asian culture was another plus and much appreciated. Another game I felt close to was Sleeping Dogs which also had representation of Asian culture. Representation matter, as an Asian American, it felt good to see these type of entertainment contents that has so much quality and authenticity in them.
Going along with my previous takedown, I blocked out a couple of ideas for a sword finisher with a few goals in mind on what I want to learn and level up. Using prop, having contact, deflect and a cool finish move that ends with a cool putting away the sword. I often uses reference to work with an idea mold in my head, sometime I’ll block in an animation before I shoot reference. Its depends. I have not found a perfect workflow yet but it has been fun experimenting different ways to work.
Around the time I had a big update of Hades to work on so, I never went further than the first initial blocking but I still had some great learning while making these. This idea will probably go into my 2021 reel if I ever have the chance to get back into it.
I had a joke about the Fox in Ghost Of Tsushima ridding on the main character Lord Sakai, while he’s ridding on his horse. I thought it would be funny to put a still together, kind of like their photo mode but much uglier using my own 2D VFX animation I’ve done years ago. The rigs were a combo of rigs I found online both free and paid. Yes, I bought a horse rig just to do this joke…but the horse rig was a good investment for later projects.