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.
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.
cyborgGirl takedown
Around mid-2020 when The Last of Us II was released, I was all about it. I was a big fan of the first one. Though I played only once…the heaviness of the story was too much for me to go another round. I loved everything about it: from storytelling to graphics, to animation ( I loved the details of the animation..insane!!!) I was inspired by one of Abby takedown animation where she kicks the enemy in the knee and then knocks them out with one punch. It was a finisher move. As usual, having daytime work, I don’t have a lot of time but I loved being inspired and continuing my motto of:” If you have an idea, make it happen!” This motto was a new motto I started to embrace this year. I believed that no matter what stage you can bring your idea to life, as long as you do it, you will learn something and advance a little bit forward…even if it’s just one tiny step at a time. I picked this particular takedown for another reason, it was a one-two punch that would require less time compared to something more complicated. This was an attempt to animate two characters in a scene with a few learning goals in mind and I wanted something I can do in a couple of weeks out of my own free time.
I started blocking in and seeing how the silhouette was reading. Were my poses clear? were the actions make sense? etc…
The cyborg rig was another rig from Kiel Figgins. Originally she was mostly nude with cyborg limbs. This was an older rig and I thought that the nude part was unnecessary. I made a color change to make it look a bit more like black spandex. The enemy rig was called Ninja rig from Built by Colossus. It was a free rig that I wanted to try out. It’s always fun to discover new rig and mess around with them to see how well they deform. There are many great one these days.
I started to mess around with camera animation. I was never properly trained with camera work…more reason to give it a try. I have plan to learn more about cameras but haven’t really had the time to. There are so many priorities, more important stuff to learn/train at the moment. The goal is to produce a couple of decent demo reel at the end of the year. I have been working toward that goal during off-hours.
Coming back to the shot I have gotten to spline in July with fresh eyes helped me see things I missed previously. Part of me wants to expand, making the takedown a bit more interesting with a couple of different actions but perhaps I will do that separately apart from this one-two takedown. For now, I’ll continue to get this to a polish state.
Sheik intro
The talented Shayleen Hulbert was making a model to be rigged by the amazing Perry Leijten. I asked to be part of the rig tester and I was accepted to be part of this awesome process. During the testing phase toward the end of the project. I blocked out this animation with a mindset of what can I do to stretch out his limps and then crunched them up to see if there are things that will break. I was happy with the blocking and decided to come back to it later. Now that Hades was shipped, I have some time to continue to work on this to bring it into my personal demo reel toward the end of the year.