The story at the beginning is the character walking through a forest to the village. He looks at the small statue on his hand, then keeps walkinng to the village inside.
The link above is the initial version made by Yann. But Karl asked me to redo the animation and redesign some of the shots. Because the forest scene and village scene are separated in Unreal engine. There are no trees at the front entrance of the village, so it will feel weird when character look at the front then suddenly the scene jump to the village from the forest. And we also need to show how the character found the small statue and lead him to the village.
My idea is the character is walking on the forest, he saw a small statue on the ground. He picks it up. However, suddenly there is a light flashes before his eye, he raises his head and looking to his front, he is shock, because he saw a big village, he is right in front of its entrance. So it means when he held the statue, he travels through time and space to the world of the Cthulhu. I think this is the good way to connect two scenes together.
In order to save time, I just start to do the previs straight away without making the storyboard at first. First give a look down to the forest, showing the whole scene, the broken train, track, damage car and walking character.
Side view.
First person view.
He saw a statue on the ground.
He picks it up and look at it. (The statue can’t show in Unreal engine because
The scene in his eye has change while he is holding the statue, he is shock. Here I’m using Dolly zoom to show the startled feeling of the character.
He saw the village and stand up, he walks in and explore the village.
The final outcome:
Because Yann had the texture files of the chracter on his computure, and I don’t know how animation sequense work in Unreal engine, so I gave my files to Yann to do the rendering. But there is a problem with the statue, it can’t show on the Unreal engine. Yann didn’t know it either. Maybe because of the way of the constraint is wrong. Or I will try to learn how to export it as ABC file the try it again. So from 20s to 24s I used playblast to replace it.
Also, there looks bit weird while the character is walking, feels quite stiff. Then I started to review the process of biped walk cycle, I find out there are some mistakes that I made.
- I used ‘Roll’ to controll the rotation of the feet when character starts walking. This way will cause the knee pop. Also when I adjusted it on the graph editer, the curves are very unusual, this will cause many problems in your animation.
The right way is use the feet controller to rotate the feet, then use to Toe controller to rotate the toe.
2. When the character lift his left leg up, the right side of the hip should be going up as well. Because when he uses right leg to stand, right leg will be sustaining the weight of the whole body. So the Hipswinger controller should contrarotate when left leg lifts. However, I have done the wrong way in this animation. It will make the walk cycle looks very unsmooth.
3. The movements of the arms look so machanical. The lower arm should be moved in inertia while walking.
But I have ran out of my time, because I need more time to prepare my showreel for the campus recruitment in China. So I will fix those problems when I have time. And also I will pay more attentions on the future animation work.