tricky situation

Lost one hour of my life looking for a possibility to make gif animations for this blog xD I learned that in this case a videoclip is still better, sorry r3AdY
Got also some feedback from my teacher. He said it's gonna be pretty tricky since it is a twisted body moving in a reeally strange way. I have just to keep on trying. But for today I'm K.O.
Good night.

He walks like a lady

I'm still far away from the actual result I'd like to achieve but we're getting there. There is still a lot to tweek especially in the upper parts. But thats my first real walk with the cycle tecnique: Tomorrow I'll ask my animation professor for some feedback.

Too slow..

This tequnique is a pretty tough job. It seems I am not getting anywhere these days. On Wednesday we've got animation lessons. Hopefully I'll get some useful input to be faster with my work.
I'm not satisfied at all.

Saturday night

Instead of making party or meet friends I just sit here in front of my Computer doing this walk cycle for our main character. Surely someone with more experience had finished that work in less than an hour but thought its something new for me it takes its time: Still it doesnt look like it should, but I'm on a good way.

Cycle all the things!!!!

After todays animation lesson I decided to start all over again with the windy walk animation. At the beginning I chose to do a pose to pose Animation but recognizing now, that that is total bullshit for a walk cycle I'll cycle now every single animation. That means: more Control!!! (and more work, but good exercise ;D)

Hello again

Oh no, shame on me D: I did'nt post anything in the last two days! :-/ maybe thats why we had lots of discussions in our team about how to proceed with the production of the game. But actually it shouldn't be an excuse, because I could have done something anyway...

Yeah, so what I did today was redesigning that one special walk against the wind for the main character. I began also to set the first keyframes and hopefully i'll upload a nice video soon :D

Dog Run Cycle

During some research I did for a next project I fell in love with Wolf Links run cycle in Twilight Princess, so I tried to do one by myself. Mesh and rig are free downloadable at Creative Crash. Tomorrow I'll post a Video when it´s done :)

Back

After two days of total unproductiveness tomorrow I'll be back at work! Many animations are waiting to be done until Goldmaster! GoGoGo!!

Chillout action

Well, finally I got some rest before the final spurt. Today I just read my new book, made some rainbow monster sketches and played with my DS all day long ;D

Three more weeks to go

The milestone today went pretty well. Now there are three weeks left until the Goldmaster and lots of animation polishing to do. Looking forward to it :) But now i need some rest. The last days were super stressful. Good night

Last day before Milestone 2

Rig is set up and now i'm doing the skinning while listening to Pirates of the caribbean soundtrack ;) yeah. it's  gonna be a looong night!

Rig changes

Yeah, as I said before we wanted to use the rig from the other character. But because of minimal differences with the proportions i decided now to change the old rig a bit and to renew the legs. Nice exercise though.

Milestone fever

On Friday our team has it`s second milestone. So we're working day and night to bring the project as far as possible. Currently I'm helping with the environment stuff and the second main character by getting him ready for the game and the cutscene ;D

 He will get the same rig as the other character for time reasons.

Rocks and stuff

Hopefully next week I'm going to continue making some animations. But since then I have du model rocks for our Level, yay

.... nothing to post :(

Since I don't want to post any ingame screenshots yet from the project im working on, there is nothing I could post on this blog :-/ because the last three days I only did some tests with shaders and painted dummy textures for our game.

New arrival

Yeah, yesterday came the awesome book I ordered.
576 pages of finest animation knowlegde

Battle plans

I just returned from a day full of discussions about what to put in our game before the goldmaster. Sadly I can't post anything I did today, because of all the talking. But it turned out to be a very good idea to decide most of the important things for our game and to clear up questions.
I think it will be nice to read this Blog in a year from now and to remember how it was working on that project. Looking forward to that. :)

Le Unwrap!

Yeah, today I spent my time staring at the UV-Unwrap Editor in 3Ds Max. We had Digital Character lessons and went on working on a head in 3D. Now I'm doing exactly the same: unwrapping some flowers for our awesome game =>

Working on it

So, now the run cycle is much smoother:

But I see, that the video quality is´nt the best, because it seems like that there are still are some serious flipping Problems... >_< any suggestions for a good (free) tool to film my screen? 

Moar anatomy

Yeah, today i´ve got photoshop lessons all day long, so in the meanwhile i did some anatomy study. I think i´ll need that in the future when doing facial animations.

Terrific weekend!!

Ermergherd!!! Check this out!!

So my team spontaneously decided to go to the Munich Filmfestival from thursday to saturday, because there they had some kind of "Game Special". It was a big deal because ThatGameCompany partecipated with a lecture about their games Flow, Flower and Journey, the ones, that inspired our student project the most. So there was no way we should not cross whole Germany to get there!

An it reaally was worth it! The first day we followed a lecture of Quanticdreams co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiére about their new game Beyond: two souls and heavy rain (one of my favorite Games of all time!) and afterwards we also got the chance to change a few words with him and take pictures. :D

Saturday finally Sunni Pavlovic, studio manager from ThatGameCompany, came to perform a both breathtaking as inspiring lecture. We all really were left there with our mouths open when she finished.
And now the clue! We got also the chance to talk with her AND to show her some screenshots from our game. She was really happy to see, that we were also trying to show the player a whole new way to make and experience games.:) I´m super motivated now to give my best to get the most out of our project :D:D

These three days: Just overwhelming, i swear! Memorable for my career as Game Animator!

Run Cycle

The run cycle so far. Still a lot to fix

Arrghhh...!!!

Yesterday I didn't post anything! That was because in the evening I went to the cinema and watched the new Superman film. :-/ But actually that´s no excuse, I should have done things earlier.... So I wanted to adjust the jump animation, but although i tried figuring out how to do the landing is still have no clue. For now I just imported the animation without landing in the engine and it kind of works, not as I wish, but it works as a dummy jump.

Today I have to create the "pushed run" animation for our character. I'm using a 2D rough animation as reference, that our Concept Artist made for me, all credits for this picture go to her. :)  Maybe later I will upload a video :)

To start over again

I was testing the jump in the engine early today when I realized that the timing I planned for the animation, wasn't working for a game. My animation needed some extra time before the character could really jump in the air, but after some research I learned that in games a Jump anticipation ruins the game feeling and I had to start the animation over again in a whole new way. But like with the other one I have problems with the landing, hopefully i'll figure out tomorrow how to fix that.