Final Game
Sprint 1
I am Arturo Chavez, the animator for team Citadel. This is my first time taking this video game production class and I am a little nervous. Most of what I’ve heard about his class is that it is very hard and there is a lot of pressure on everyone. Seeing what the class is about and finally starting to work with the team, I look forward to it. I see it as a great learning experience. This class will help me gain a little bit of experience doing animation for a game, but also experience in using a workflow similar to what is used in the industry.
During this sprint, as the animator I wasn’t able to animate due to the lack of a working rig. To stay busy during this sprint, I was tasked to gather references for a walk and run cycle as well as several light and heavy attacks for the player character and two enemy characters. Gathering reference for these characters isn’t as simple as finding any generic walk, run or attack. As the animator, I have to consider the genre, setting and style of the game as well as distinguishing factors of each character. I relied a lot on the mood board and feedback from the Game Designer to find the appropriate reference of the different characters.
I took each character and analyzed different aspects. First personality, are they good, bad or neutral. Next I looked at their physical attributes like size and weight. A gaunt looking character and a heavy set character don’t move the same way, even if they are the same species. The player character reminded me of Assassin’s Creed and of a Samurai, so I looked for reference in those things. The character modeler, the Game Designer and I talked about the goblin character and I mentioned that I imagined it walking similar to a chimp on all fours. We discussed the similarities of the goblin and a chimp and possible differences that I can introduce to make it unique. For the orc, I looked at a gorilla walking upright and bodybuilders with oversized backs. I managed to finish all my cards with one waiting for verification. For the next sprint, I should probably get more cards and some 3 point cards so that I don’t just wait around. As soon as a rig is available, I don’t see that as being too difficult.
Sprint 2
For this sprint I was finally able to begin animating. I imported the rig into Maya, but I either imported it wrong, had something in my settings or something else happened that didn't allow me to use the rig. So I took the rig's HIK, which seemed to be the problem from what I found online, and baked it to the skeleton and rigged the model using the skeleton. That seemed to work so I did the first animation with that.
Animating this went smoothly for the most part. However the game designer didn't like that the robe moved individually from the body. We spent a couple days trying to figure out what we could do to fix this. I retried using the original rig by downloading it from the drive again and importing it into Maya again. For some reason it worked this time, it was probably just a corrupt download the first time. We also decided to keep the first animation as is because we were losing too much time. The next issue came with importing the animation into Unity, which took a couple days, then by dumb luck I tried something different and it worked. However, the naming convention of the bones on the right arm were different from what Unity was looking for so it wouldn't characterize. I tried to see if renaming them in the rig file then referencing the rig in the animation file would work, and sure enough it did. Before figuring this out, I gathered reference for some magic attacks to keep busy while the Game Designer did the trouble shooting.
Due to falling behind, I knew I had to work a little harder to catch up. I busted out a walk animation in a few hours. For this I used the original rig which was now working correctly. However, Unity had a hard time with it as well. The issue was simpler, I just needed to include a t-pose at the beginning to characterize it. This happened Wednesday night around 10:30 pm. From 10:30pm until 1ish am, I quickly animated a light attack and woke up and got to work to bust out a second light attack.
With the issues, I had a slow start to the sprint and got a good amount of work done during the second half of the sprint. I was assigned 10 points, 6 of which were verified, the other 4 were moved to "needs verify" Thursday morning. The amount of work isn't difficult to get done, but the problems that arose definitely ate up a lot of time which kept me from doing more work than I could have done.
Sprint 3
This sprint was far more productive and everything moved mostly in a straight line for me except a few times I had to go back and make adjustments to animations. My tasks were very straightforward. I focused 100% on animations for the player character. First off was finishing the run animation and the light attacks, which spilled over from sprint 2. Next was all sprint 3. Initiating the jump, hang time as the player travels upwards, hang time as it falls, landing, an idle, turning, death, and 2 spell animations.
Jumping, air time up & down, and landing merged
Idle
Turning
Dying
All the issues with the rig both exporting from Maya and importing into Unity have been resolved. From that point on, it seems that all I'll have to do is animate, which is better for me and better for the team. With those issues taken care of, this sprint has been much smoother for me which translates to better work. I completed both cards from last sprint and completed five from this sprint, one card is in "Needs Verify" and two are incomplete as of now. That means that I completed 9 points worth of work with 3 pending verification and 2 incomplete. That is 3 more points completed from the last sprint, 6 more including the card in "Needs Verify". As of now, most animations for the player are complete, it looks like next I'll be moving onto the goblins and orcs. If no major issues come up, I can say that the next sprint will move at a similar pace as this one.
Sprint 4
A lot of progress was made this sprint. I finished 2 cards that spilled over from the last sprint and finished all that were assigned this sprint. One card was left in “needs verify” from last sprint, but was verified as soon as this sprint began. I quickly finished the other 2 remaining from last sprint, which were the fireball throw animation and the icicle spell animation. 9 cards were verified, a total of 11 points, nothing was left in “in progress” or “needs verify”.
Fireball Throw Icicle
I was only assigned 6 cards this sprint, all of which were 1 pointers, a couple cards were pretty close to being 3s. First off was the goblin walk and attack, orc walk and attack, lastly the eye flying and attack. The goblin walk and attack were very close to being 3 pointers. The goblin’s proportions make it very difficult to pose without clipping or breaking the rig, so there were a few poses that took a really long and cleaning it was also a bit time consuming. The orc has very similar proportions to the goblin, but because the orc walks upright, the arms didn’t really cause any problems, unlike the goblin that walks on fours. The eyeball was a little challenging but really fun to do. It was very difficult to find reference because it isn’t a real thing and it isn’t like a bird. I decided to animate the flight and attack without reference, which is a bit risky but the final result came out great and the team really liked them.
Goblin
Orc
Eyeball
Sprint 5
This sprint was spent finishing all the player animations and getting a bulk of the enemy animations. I animated the last two player animations which were for the pox and invuln spell. These were very simple animations for what they are in the game. I believe that these two spells are the most powerful spells, yet their animations look weak in comparison. Next I had to do the animations for the walk and attacks for both skeletons. The attacks, despite being more complicated, were fun and relatively easy to do. The walks gave me more trouble. Despite being much more simple, the walks took a few hours longer to do than the attacks. Since walking is something we do all the time and see all the time, any minor mistake looks 5x as bad as it would in any other animation.
Finally for this sprint, I had to animate the idle and attack animation for squiggmarrr’s head and tentacles. For this I used whips and hair underwater for reference as tentacled animals don’t really move the way you’d think. These were really fun to do and pretty easy. The animations for squiggmarrr and the eye have been the least troublesome because they are rigged using Maya’s advanced skeletal system as opposed to all the other characters that use Maya’s HIK system. Maya can’t handle the HIK system very well and there is a lot of extra clean up that has to be done.
Sprint 6
The last two weeks were dedicated mostly to enemy animations. We thought that the player animations were all done, but Tuesday while some of the finished animations were being applied and tested, the Game Designer realized that there wasn’t an animation for when the player was being hit. So I was given that Tuesday before the end of the sprint. I also wasn't given a card for when squiggmarrr was defeated or when it comes back from the dead. So I did those to finalize squiggmarrr’s animations.
Next was all idle and death animation’s for the other enemies. For the orc, I wanted to show its size and power so I had it show off its power in its idle by making it flex and roar. In its death, I wanted it to fall hard but slowly to show its weight. The goblin is pretty much the exact opposite, it is light and much weaker. For the death, I made it fly back so it looks like it is completely mogged when it is attacked by the much stronger player character. Earlier in the semester, we talked about having the goblin be dumber than the orc, so to show that I had it scratch its but and sniff its hand after. The goblin yet again was very problematic. I had to pose the hand that is on the floor frame by frame and fix many weird rotation issues. Both skeleton Idles were more or less the same. Finally was the eye. I took the flying animation but made the wings flap in a shorter range of motion. For the death, I used the same reference that I used for the goblin death. I am left with one card for the skeleton death. The last minute player animation pushed me over the line a bit and I didn’t finish all my cards.
Sprint 7
At this point in the development of the game, there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do. I was given my final cards for new animations in sprint 6. Most of those cards were completed except for one 1 point card. That card was for the death animations for both the Lancer and Archer skeletons. I kept those animations pretty simple and made them be similar to each other, but obviously with some variation so that they were unique. They were really easy to do with no major problems. Although the lancer did take more time because it has two objects in its hands that are both rather large. For the lancer, I had to be extra careful to keep the objects from clipping too much into the ground, the archer’s bow has a thin profile so that wasn’t a huge deal.
After that card was completed, I was given a 3 point card that just said I had to polish the animations. I talked to the game designer and he said it was best if I didn’t reanimate anything and just clipped and retimed the animations with Unity’s animator. He was happy with how the animations looked and didn’t think it was necessary to reanimate anything. So I watched every animation in Unity and clipped any T-poses that were left in, extra frames unused frames, and any bad frames that kept the animations from cycling correctly. Once that was done, I went into the animator and sped some animations up if they were too slow and slowed down ones that were too fast. What I looked for, besides speed, was weight. Particularly with the orc, tentacles and goblin. The orc and tentacles are large, so slower movements conveyed their weight better so I slowed down their animations. The goblin is the opposite, small so it needs faster movements.
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