Elias Runelid - Animator

ACTING

When I watched samurai jack for the first time I vividly remembered a scene where he eats sushi and I've always wanted to do a shot with a character eating because of that.

I chose this idea because I felt it was a good opportunity to animate a character interacting with different props and the constraints that would be required to make that a possibility. I originally considered having the character eat a hamburger, but I ultimately chose sushi because I really liked the idea of animating a character with chopsticks.

Amy Rig by Gabrial Salas

UNREAL MOVESET

The animations were created in Maya using animation layers for the face, tail and other accessories. I very often utilise animation layers when I animate because I feel it is a more manageable workflow, this also gives me an easy way to introduce variation in my looping animations like the idle and walk for example.

The attack is a three hit combo that you can continue after each individual strike if you keep pressing the attack button. While jumping, you can perform a jump dash by pressing the button a second time. I added this dash because I think it ads more energy and personality to the character.

Implementing the animations in unreal was probably the most challenging aspect of the project, especially the attack combo and the jump dash. However, I have made similar movesets in the past so it was simply a matter of improving upon things I had already done. This project was also the first time I used Unreal 5, all of my previous Unreal movesets were done in Unreal 4.

Kaju Rig by Naniphat Phae-ngam

Kaju Model by Seraphim Serafimy

Stylized Forest by TomkaGS

ATTACK ANIMATION

With this project I wanted to create a couple of fighting game animations. I felt very inspired to do this when I saw the ystra characters two magical arms as I felt they would be perfect for a fighting game character.

One of the biggest challenges with this project was animating all of Ystras clothes, hair and other accessories, they were very large and would easily clip into each other if not carefully considered. There were also a few control setups that I was not used to animating with, which took a little time to get used to.

Another challenge when animating the attacks was the short anticipation time. Fighting game animations requires very short start up time for the purpose of the gameplay. I often found myself with anticipations that were too long. I had to consciously reel myself in a few times and consider how well these animations would actually work in a fighting game

Ystra Rig by Christoph (The Stoff) Schoch

Ystra Concept by Alexis Pflaum

LIP SYNCH

This was a lip synch exercise, I used myself as a reference for this animation. I wanted the performance to communicate that the woman is incredibly vain, but also self aware enough to realize that she said something silly. The original audio is from Groundhog Day.

Bonnie Rig by Josh Sobel