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.