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.