Witch Hunt character animation

So have decided to do a write-up on the animation system I worked out for the main character in Witch Hunt, which I am rather proud of. Here goes:

The first iteration of the character was completely movement based, her animations only responded to your movement, and ignored any firing or reloading actions. Also, the actual walking animations did not blend together very well:

Example #1

For the next iteration of the witch, I created run cycles for the legs, and shoot and reload cycles for the upper body.

Example #2

The obvious weakness here is that when the character is running, the upper body stays completely static. I couldn't easily animate a walk cycle above the waist, because firing or reloading would interrupt it. After pondering the problem for a while and trying a few different approaches, this is what I came up with for the next iteration:

First, I created the run cycles the same way, freezing all motion above the pelvis. Here's the forward run as an example:

Next I made the shooting and reloading animations, but this time I also made a walking-with-weapon animation. Here are the animations for a couple of the guns:

Now I again had a witch that could walk and shoot at the same time, but she suffered the same problem that Example #2 had: a very stiff upper body. The solution I came up with for that was to procedurally bend the spine to the left and right with a sine curve clamped to the walking animation. Since it's only bending to the left and right of the facing direction, the movement of the spine does not throw off the character's aiming direction. Extra procedural animation was added to the head and hat to complement the movement of the spine.

Example #3

As you can probably see, there are still a few flaws here I have yet to fix, but it addresses most of the major issues I was concerned about. I'd like to see if I can figure out a good way to add some forward and back spine motion and compensate for that in the shoulders.

Witch Hunt enemies

Here's a clip of the first level boss and an enemy I did (concept, modeling, texturing, rigging, animating) for Witch Hunt, the game that is currently a finalist in the ESA's E3 College Game Competition. The bear is wearing a saddle because Prince Charming rides him. I'll need to post some video from the game so you can see the procedural work I did on the bear. The prince also has a pretty cool procedural setup that bends his body in response to the movement of the bear.

I'll post more as soon as I get a chance!

Advanced Storyboarding

First assignment for Ryan Woodward's advanced storyboarding class. Goal was to create a "trunk monkey" ad in four panels. It was tough, as I'd never done any storyboarding before, but I had fun and learned a lot.

Random Ship Generator

Here's a random ship generator I made for class on Houdini. It basically just piles some randomly scaled cubes on top of each other, then throws some wings and a cockpit on, but I think the results are kind of cool. I wouldn't use the results as final models for anything, but it's great for concepting crazy ship ideas really fast.

Character Concept

Concept of a character made for a 3D
animation class.

And a silly little animation to test the rig.

Some quick sketches!

 Some random sketches I did in church.

 

 

(Yes, that first one was definitely based on a Protoss)

School is over!

My final assignment:

Near the beginning of time, the witch Dubheasa took the sun god Alauniu hostage by poisoning the sunset with the juice of a nightshade plant. Her magic was diminished by the heat of the sun, and so with Alauniu's chariot grounded, perpetual twilight cloaked the world, and her powers grew. A young warrior named Aithne had heard the prophecy that Dubheasa could only be defeated at the hand of Balor, the king of the giants. The witch thought that she was perfectly safe, as the giants disliked the light of day as much as she did. Aithne went to the mountains where Balor and his kin lived, and tricked the prideful giant into lifting a mountain above his head. With a sharp swing of her axe, the girl chopped Balor's left hand off just below the wrist. The foolish giant was unable to safely set down the mountain with one hand, and as he called for help, Aithne took his hand and ran. She next bound the fingers into a fist with a short length of rope. Now prepared to do battle with the witch, she traveled to the black cliffs where Dubheasa had taken Alauniu...