Animation and Mocap

Here are some more characters I rigged and animated:

Various Zombies’ walks

Fat Zombie walk

Zombie crawl

Knight Run – realistic

Knight Run – cartoony

Fire Witch attack – 31 bones – animated in Max

Idea for an intro brand promo for Merge Interactive

Music game floater robots

droideka walk and roll

curl, roll and uncurl

C3PO walk

For Star Wars Galaxies, I came up with a cool way to make our droids explode by using physics dynamics in Maya to drive the bones on the character. The results were satisfying once paired up with nice effects.

Mocap

On SWG, we did a ton of mocap, with something like 800 animations. None of the other artists wanted to manage it, so I volunteered. I helped to direct the shoot, captured start and end poses, and managed the outsourcing of a lot of the cleanup. I also did a lot of the cleanup myself. I learned Filmbox (now MotionBuilder), which was where the majority of the editing took place, though the hand animations and some weapon cleanup were done later in Maya, from which we exported our game assets.

One of the technical challenges was getting the juggling to loop correctly, because a ball or pin or ring that started in one place was rarely or never in the same place and orientation when the loop completed. I was able to come up with a pain-free solution to that problem that saved us a good deal of time and money.