The very last change to the rig before animation! I was having a lot of problems with the legs, hips, and rear when doing more extreme or exaggerated poses, so I really wanted to correct that. It was going to be pretty necessary to have correct, because of how the keyframing was set up for the planned animation test.
To do this, I used Royal Skies' tutorial on hip and butt rigging and weight paint, and after a lot of trial and error, it's working pretty well!
And to test it, I had to find a pretty exaggerated pose for testing hips and leg positioning, sooo...
Yup, this works!
(The character is Jack-O from the Guilty Gear series)
While the hips aren't perfect, they're more than serviceable for my applications.
Also, a smaller change before starting actual animations, a motion smear for the sword! This will help better sell the motion and momentum of the swing.
First test! An idle animation for standing with no input. The idea for this character from the start has been as a platformer/fighting game character, so the animations will be all from profile view.
The main problems I had with this after finishing it were first (and kinda obviously, in hindsight) that it was in 30 fps, and also just that it was a bit too wobbly, as if the bouncing were almost a little tipsy.
Before fixing that though, I tried an attack animation!
This one I rendered at both 30fps and 60fps to test different timings and speeds.
The problems here are a bit harder to pin. It's mainly that her center of gravity is moving too drastically for how fast I want the attack to be, and I should tone down the motion to make it look a bit less rushed. This is something I fix a bit better in the follow-up animations!
Moving on to the finished set, the fixed idle animation! I focused more on the arcs of motion on the figure for this one, making it a bit more of a controlled bounce. To emphasize the movement without making it too drastic, I made her hips swivel more while moving side to side less, making it look like she's shifting her weight between the legs.
After finishing that, I went back to my original parry and counter-attack storyboard! Here it is for reference:
I wanted to split this animation into two separate parts: the parry, and the attack. So, I started by creating the parry itself:
The main things I changed between the storyboard and the finished product were making her actually step into the motion, and emphasizing the windup more. This makes it feel like a mix of a shoulder tackle and a guard, which is what I was going for.
And now, the counter!
Slash! The big thing here is that she slashes first, then steps back, then strikes. The point is kind of what I was talking about up above about not moving the center of gravity too fast. If her pelvis began moving during the slash, the momentum of the swipe would get lost in translation, so I added an extra keypose to the things I planned in the storyboard. Beyond that, there's also just a lot of other little things that go into more complex motions like this, such as the arcs of motion, and the secondary motions of her tail, ears, sheathe, and hair, that act counter to the primary motion. On top of all of that, you can see the smear from above on her sword here too!
And finally, it all comes together!
The first demo reel of many hopefully!
Next week is going to be all about motion smears and special effects to layer on top of all of this to really sell the impact and weight of the movement. Next week I'll be all done with this character, and even more than that, I'll finally reveal her name too! Stay tuned til then!
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