Game Animation

Kelly Chua’s 3D Game Animation Showcase

Hi there! I’m super excited to share the work I’ve done throughout my year at 3dsense Media School under the Game Art course specialising in 3D game animation. I will describe the process behind my favourite pieces of work that I have created in the last year, which consists of the attack combo, character intro, parkour and boss intro cinematic.

Character Writeup

For my 2nd term in 3dsense, I was tasked with choosing a rig to animate with and developing our own character with said rig throughout the entire term. The rig I ended up going with was Kiel Figgins’s Junker (link to the rig here). For my character’s personality I drew inspiration primarily from Akame from Akame ga Kill! with sprinkles of League of Legends’ Riven as I wanted to go for the stoic swordswoman background.

Attack Combo

My favourite animation assignment throughout my time in 3dsense. As a kenjutsu practitioner, this project provided me with the freedom to incorporate some of the techniques I’ve learnt into an actual animation which was really fun to act out. The attack combo starts with a 2-hit light attack across the body from the shoulder into a heavy jump attack before it settles back into the idle pose.

The main challenge I had with the project mainly came in the form of making the spacing between the attacks feel natural, especially when it came to the jump attack. Honourable mention goes to the follow through and overlapping action for the other set of struggles I remember going through the most from animating this assignment as I spent a good amount of time figuring out how the hair should move in relation to the motion of the body.

Parkour

The first assignment in my 3rd and final term in 3dsense. For this assignment I chose to use Kiel Figgins’s Scout Pilot as I felt that I could craft a little background story that would serve as the context of my parkour sequence with this character. The idea behind the moveset was based around a reconnaissance mission where the Scout was eventually caught snooping around and had to escape to safety. Background aside, I wanted the parkour sequence to have changes in direction and a number of jumps and at least 1 vault as a portion of this project was inspired by certain obstacles in the game show Ninja Warrior, namely the wall climb that the younger me fondly remembers as one of the major hurdles that stopped many contestants in their tracks whenever the show was on TV.

If there was an assignment that truly tested my limits in terms of my understanding of the 12 principles, this would be the one. Throughout this project I struggled immensely with spacing and ease in/outs as my animation would always get comments about how certain segments had a weird fast/slow/fast/slow feel to it which I had to dedicate a lot of time and effort to fix as best as I could in the given time we had. The cinematography of the parkour was also something that I faced some challenges in as this assignment was where I learned that camera movement also plays a part in making an animation feel natural to watch, especially with a fast moving sequence like parkour.

Overall though, I did really enjoy animating this despite all the challenges that I faced in terms of my fundamentals and I learned a lot about body mechanics and other technical skills along the way.

Boss Intro

Our second assignment of the 3rd term and my class’s last animation assignment overall. My concept for this cinematic was designed around the Ivory Champion rig by Kiel Figgins. This rig gave me the impression of a holy guardian of sorts and reminded me of the Imperius vs. Diablo cutscene because Imperius’s design felt in line with the rig I chose. Part of my boss intro was inspired by the segment of Imperius calling down his spear from the sky before doing battle with Diablo.

The idea for the boss intro came from encounters with fortress/castle guardians with large, imposing figures wielding equally large weapons against any player characters that try to invade the building. I wanted the boss to start in a state of inactivity and only start moving when it detects any hostile approaching and then summon a holy weapon from the sky before flourishing it towards the camera/player as the boss fight begins.

This assignment presented a different set of challenges compared to the parkour assignment that came before it, most of it coming from the weapon twirling action that happens after the boss picks up the weapon that he summoned from the sky. For that particular sequence I struggled a lot with the boss’s body mechanics and the technical aspect of making the twirl look smooth especially when it came to animating the arms. I also faced some difficulty in the more subtle movements that resulted in earlier stages of the animation looking very floaty all around and unappealing but I managed to overcome that thanks to the help of my lecturer’s critique guiding me on the right path.

Thanks for making it to the end of my showcase and sticking with me! I hope you enjoyed the animations I put out on display today. I would just like to say that my year at 3dsense was one hell of a rollercoaster ride with all the ups and downs and turns. Having started out from basically zero in terms of animation, seeing my progress from day one till now really opened my eyes to the world of animation and how fun it could really be, which is a journey my past self from this point in time a year ago could never have anticipated to take.

I would like to especially thank Ricwan for inspiring me to make the switch from modelling to animation and showing me a whole new world of creating art and Justin Kwek for being there with me and the class for the last third of the journey while imparting your years of experience onto us to give us a headstart in our animation journeys. This whole experience has been invaluable to me despite all the struggles I’ve been through for the past year and I look forward to practising more kinds of animation and creating new projects as I go on.

My Contacts:

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-chua-cs