Vive l'animation!

The last two weeks, though officially graduated and currently looking for work, has been busy and hectic, so that's fantastic. I could use this, and I've been tempted believe me, as downtime for a job well done, but I refuse to let that happen for two reasons: a) I'm in a productive routine that might be hard to get back into if I get out of it and b) this animation stuff is really fun anyways. There seems to be lots to keep me busy and keep me working on my skills and the more practice I get in, the more refined my skills seem to get; I guess it's a testament to the never ending learning curve in this industry and I have to admit, nothing excites me more.

I spent the majority of last week working on the uber shot for Mass Animation, which constituted of 16 characters, a bus and 7 seconds, most of which was bullet time. The payoff for this was a substantial reward, but more importantly to be a shining portfolio piece. Sad to say, I didn't win, but that's ok, I won for a game cycle in Phase 2 and already a trailer shot in Phase 1, so it will still compliment my resume nicely. It's funny as the reason I did the game cycle was to have a taste of the gratification of having an animation in game that is used by players, and to be quite frank, I didn't think I'd win that one, so the world works in mysterious ways. Since the competition is officially over, I'll post my uber-shot that I grueled over, as I'm fairly pleased with it, and I imagine I must have been close to winning, hopefully I'll finish polishing this regardless.



It's also been a good week for busting out cycles for Age of Chivarly; I managed to get all my sprint cycles done for the crusader character wielding a flamberge as well as an idle cycle. I'm fairly happy with those too, but I will come back and polish those, for the meantime, it's something to test their functionality in game. Next up on the list is attacks and parries (woo woo!) should be interesting as they are torso only animations, but regardless should be alot of fun. I was hoping to start work on those already, but there was a lot of backend stuff I had to learn (even deconstruct and rewrite code) to get these animations to import into the game properly, a fun challenge to be sure.

And more recently, I've spent the past couple days on and off working on my entry for the 11 Second Club this month. The audio clip this time around is so... unique, it provides such an interesting challenge. I thought of a few different ideas, but I kept coming back to one in my head so I went with my gut instinct on it. At a glance it seems rather weird to me, but with refinement and a properly modelled set, I think it will all come together. Regardless, it is a chance for some super fun and polished animation, but here's my first pass blocking thus far. I plan to spend time this weekend going back and pushing the poses and checking my arcs to see they are on track.