Game Animation

Introduction

Hey! Lester here. Here are two of my favourite works from my time in 3dsense. Definitely pulled some late nights for these and some hard thinking. It was all thanks to the patience of the lecturers that made these possible

Combo Attack

PROGRESSION REEL

I wanted to go for a undisciplined bruiser sort of character and I wanted to emphasize on using the sword & shield and not just the blade of the sword. The first strike is with a shield supposedly to break the guard of the enemy. While the enemy is off balanced, the second strike comes in with a shield bash, shifting the body weight from the hips into the shield and into the enemy staggering their balance furthermore. Third strike is with a haymaker punch using the guard of the sword. The fourth strike is more of a consequence for the wind up for the biggest attack with a final swinging upper cut (pun intended).

I wanted to show how having a common weapon combo, the sword & shield, doesn’t necessarily make for a less interesting character. Depending on what kind of character you’re trying to portray, you can make changes in the way they fight, their posture, their stance and their swings to show their personality and how they carry themselves. Also with swords, cutting and slashing don’t have to be the only thing it’s used for. There are different ways to handle a sword, some more unconventional than others such as bludgeoning with the hilt or even halfswording and striking with the guard.

Special Attack Game Animation

I’m not going to lie, I almost didn’t make this one because I was in creative and technical paralysis. This was incredibly hard to make with lots of snapping, math, a little bit of trickery and a lot of trying to wrap the space around my head. Thanks to my lecturer, Azarudeen Shanavas, I was able to weed it out and make something I was genuinely proud of.

First of all, nobody is able to jump that high from spinning in real life. So other than using the center of gravity as a guideline for measuring speed and height, I thought of another way to use the spins to make the jump more believable. Each time a foot reaches a high point in a spin, I use it as a pseudo invisible anchor to “step” on so the other foot could then climb up. Then when the jump reaches its peak, I tried to hang the reverse C shape of the body for a good moment for a bigger whipping effect when the character finally throws down the weapon. I also squashed & stretched the weapon just a little bit for added exaggeration. The tricky part was trying to return the character back into the idle pose after the amount of spinning but I was able to math my way back into the pose.

I think the biggest contributing fact that I feel made this animation feel as good as it is, probably from all the arcs I tracked from tip of the sword, both feet and the hips. It might’ve been a little overkill but I liked it.