Animation of Azri Swinging A Sword Like Patrick Bateman Killing Paul From That Scene In American Psycho

Name: Azri Swinging A Sword Like She's Patrick Bateman Axing Paul In American Psycho
Time Taken: 4.5 hour(s)

Assets:
[MODEL] AZRI by Gameanim

Der Prozess:

I used this scene from American Psycho. I chose it because I had a budget of about 5-10 seconds of reference, and this scene looked quite..."full of action".

I've loaded the character (as a reference) and added the reference video (image as image sequence). Let's begin!

First, I animated the torso and shoulders (only).

Next come the elbows.

Then, I added the sword and to the hands. Apparently rotating the elbow is quite dangerous. You really need to keep track of where it rotates and don't confuse a wrist rotation with an elbow rotation. I wonder if there's a method to make sure the elbow isn't twisted? Like, just looking at it doesn't always do the trick.

I've decided to not make the second hand hold the sword hilt as well. The rig doesn't have a controller for that and attempts to create a locator to act as a constraint have failed. You just need to recognize a losing battle when you see one, lest you lose a  lot of time achieving very little.

Then its just some lip syncing and hair animation. Minor corrections to the previous ones were also made.

Add some lights and we are done!

Here's a little 4 panel breakdown video:
Panel 1: Reference.
Panel 2: Blocking (the bare minimum movements to set things up).
Panel 3: Splining (doing all the movements proper and playing with the animation graph a little to fix things, basically a prerender without the lights).
Panel 4: Render, adding the lights.