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 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.
Blizzard intro challenge attemp
About two weeks to the end of May, I decided to “try” to do the AnimChallenge which was a short six seconds of Blizzard-like highlight intro animation video. The free rig was provided by Agora. Rigged by the great Kiel Figgins. The model of Symmetro was created by Tim Oliver Haag.
I thought it would be interesting to create a grappling component to add into the rig. However, I did not do a good job with the rope rig, I didn’t have time to experiment either so I used it anyway.
Creating art and animation after work hours can be tough and exhausting at times. I think that no matter what stage your own exploration or learning projects are, they are still relevant and are important to your growth. Although the risk of putting your work out in the world whether if they are finish yet or not can be negative because they can be seen by potential employers who may not have time to read your explanation of stage they’re in. Also continuously posting work in progress can be as negative as well if you never post finished polish work. At least these are what’s going on in my mind when I decide to post something online.
I recently looking into the working file of this animation again with the goal of continuing to work on it as it has some potential, it could go into my personal demo reel. I saw so many issues made in May. In particular, the spine was quite stiff and poses were not so great. Overall things were moving too fast. I need to break it up further. Previously I tried to squeeze everything into 6 seconds which was part of the challenge but if one can not understand what’s going on, it would not be a good video regardless.
I was happy to see all of these issues, it meant that I grew since May. My skills had leveled up. That old yearning and wishing to have more time in a day, more energy to work on my animation skills comes again and again. Animation sure is tough. It is a marathon after all. It is so satisfying when you get a bit more stamina, a bit more knowledge, and a bit more skillful each time I do an animation project whether for fun or for work.