Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I liked your approach to the project from a research POV. I also liked the fact that you've taken the time to thumbnail the required actions. You've chosen a difficult set of motions to bring to realisation and have made a good attempt at getting them to work in UE.
• The anims are all VERY quick and all of a similar pace, which makes them quite hard to read. The pacing and movement/timings need looking at to create a more dynamic set. Some quite unnatural body movements are detracting from the final result. Slow things down and aim for a more polished end result.
• Some nice initial concepts here in the documentation and the sketches are great to get those key poses and main feeling of your animation, it is also great that you re-created them in Maya to see how they would look in a 3D space on the character! I do really like the animation but I feel like the goal of the task wasn’t fully followed through. It's important to triple check through tasks (which I know can be a bit tedious at times when you’re eager to animate!) but this will assure you that you are following the criteria of what needs to be made. I love the references that you gathered and putting these two together was very good to see, I would just recommend next time to gather some more references and try to act out the action and record yourself to see what feels and looks natural. The Victory knee slide is a great base reference for the idea but since the player in the video is not holding something like a weapon in their hand, then we don’t get a great reference to base our animation off due to a sword weighing a fair bit which would impact the pose we would do when sliding. Great job on getting this into the Unreal Engine and gathering more knowledge on how that pipeline works to help show of your animations in the future, this will help you present your work at a much higher quality compared to Maya renders (You can get good Maya renders but the ease of Unreal Engine helps speed up the process). One thing I would have liked to have seen is you reflecting on a bit more of some of the struggles and issues you ran into when gathering reference, finding the best rig and testing out others, Unreal Engine implementation issues etc. so we can see where you have reflected and improved from this project. This is a really cool idea, and I can see it being used in a game; sliding down a hill while slicing enemies and then a big front flip finisher on the person at the bottom! Run cycles are a nightmare to create and you’ve done a good job here with the transition of the first and last frame flowing very smoothly, the head does feel a bit too static and even though the arms are following they don’t feel like they are being impacting by each step (mainly the hand with the heavy sword). Adding a bit of overlap and bounce to the head and arms after each step will help sell the weight and natural feeling of the animation! What I recommend when practising walk / run cycles is to just prototype and make some quick tests, then move fastly onto a fresh one and take what you’ve learnt from the previous animation and improve it! This quick turn over will help stop fatigue and stress with trying to improve one animation and allow you to create multiple cycles which will help improve those body mechanics much faster! The Unreal Engine set up is great, it’s nice to see the animation on each podium and having some extra animations for the character walking around and even sprinting and jumping! Some great little features which I admire hugely, it would have been good to document this implementation since it’s a cool feature! With the sliding, the finger poses are great, to help push this animation to the next stage, I would play around more with the pose so we have less twinning (mirroring) of the legs and the arms feel a bit similar too; maybe having one leg semi stretched forward with the sword dragging behind the character to create a stronger silhouette. Since you have a good base here, you could jump into Maya and using Animation Layers, you can make one quick pose keyframe and test how it looks without having to edit the base layer! The sliding sword attack is really nice and I love the arc of the sword when it swings across, one thing that sticks out to me here is how all the motion finish at the same time between the left and right arms; you could delay the sword a bit more to help convey some weight and then follow through and overlap on the left arm so it doesn’t go straight back to the slide pose. This finishing flip is amazing and how it leads into the run cycle again is great to see, so top job on this finishing move! I would just say that there needs to be one more keyframe between the end of the flip as it lands since there is a large difference in these 2 poses, so a nice strong keyframe pose here will help ease the eye into seeing the transition and I really like this timing on this attack too! Overall, great work on this Adam, the animation is refreshing and great to see and I can see this as an animation in a game. The sketching is good to see as well since it’s quick to draw the initial ideas and get your ideas out on a page. It will be exciting to see what animations are to come from you in the future!
• First of all I want to congratulate you on making your project, in my opinion self-discipline and willpower are important for this:). I am an animator by speciality, so I will mostly comment on the body mechanics of your character, taking into account the peculiarities of gameplay animation. Your character is too fast in timing. There are no pauses for weight transfer or to regain balance. When you run, your character's body looks frozen and practically doesn't move. Well done for using a reference, but in the source material the character is a bit fractured, so that should have been taken into account. There are slightly different laws in drawn animation. When you flip over, you don't feel the moment when the character pushes off and catches his balance. When the character strikes with the sword, there is a lack of preparation and pause after the blows, it's as if he's just waving in the air with no intention. I would recommend that you refer more to references so that you can analyze how the body behaves under certain circumstances. Often, it's impossible to just come up with it, because the viewer will feel that something is wrong. You just need to pay more attention to the packaging of animation, and the search for body balance. Thank you for a great job!
• Hi Adam! Hope you are doing well, Thank you for participating in the GradsinGames Competition! I like your animation poses and timing. You did a good job animating with references. Currently, we are seeing a side and a front view perspective. Would be interesting to see the player's point of view so we could understand if the movement and the poses correspond well. Maybe add 1 or 2 poses. One on frame 401. You can keep one leg still platted on the ground (this one is the pushing force) and the second pose on frame 409. The screen's left leg could still be in the air. Offsetting body parts to give a more natural feeling. Keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to seeing your next steps! Recommended links to boost your animation skills: The Perils of Interpolation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwamE6Hy04&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Knockback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVktK4a9Yfo&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Damage Animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xHE3ypX96U&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Follow-Throughs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xHE3ypX96U&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Follow-Throughs Make the Impact https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIB0BUe6Ihk&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Attack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIB0BUe6Ihk&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Attack Poses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99gdMDF7V2E&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99gdMDF7V2E&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames
• I think you’ve got a good set of animations and I like that you’ve pushed the animation to be more stylized. Keeping the sword arm back for the run looks good and coveys it’s weight. I think bending her left arm as it travels back during the run would emphasize the reach that you have on the forwards movement, and shortening the amount of contact you have with the feet on the floor would give you more speed and momentum; for example the devil man run only makes contact for 2 frames, so although I can appreciate this is more extreme it’s something you could experiment with. With more stylized feminine cycles I often keep the legs closer together while they’re in the air, even crossing behind the other leg as it leaves the ground. If you wanted to push this further you could also make the feet closer to the center of her body when they’re on the ground. Straightening the leg out more as you reach for the ground can also break up the shape of the bent leg. Adding a bit more movement to the head also I think would look nice. Richard Williams has a great book called The Animators Survival Kit which I used to find really beneficial when making cycles, you can find a lot of the images from the book online also. Your spin has got a nice flow to it and I think the idea is fun. I think continuing her upwards movement would give you more space to get the legs under her body, and it would then be easier to keep her center of gravity over her legs towards the end. With your slide, if she’s going to be travelling forward during it then maybe leaning her body leant back more with the momentum would be nice. It can help to test out cycles which are moving forward with the forward action on them in maya on the root for instance, you can then mute this channel when you’re editing your animation. In a similar fashion to your run perhaps keeping her sword arm further back during this cycle, and giving yourself a mesh target that she’s hitting to make sure the sword has a good trajectory. With the motion arc of the sword, I sometimes add a locator, constrain it to the tip of a weapon, and then add a motion trail to check what kind of arc it’s making, as the audience’s eye is often drawn to this. Maya has it’s own one if you’ve not used it, there are better versions out there but it does an ok job. https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2022/ENU/?guid=GUID-A4F827EE-61C2-4F0A-9592-E91AA20F5D2C
• I think the idea of the animations is really cool but it feels unpolished, there is not much up - down action on the pelvis during the run and the upper body doesn't really feel like is running, try to pay more attention to details and weight of the character.
• A nice attempt at a playable sequence, but unfortunately let down by very limited animation body mechanics, weight and flow. - The lack of hip movement while in motion , Knee stability (when swinging) and nuance throughout spoil the overall feel. To improve i would definitely look more into physical body mechanic reference, in particular to understand weight and momentum as the sword feels like it has no mass and the body lacks flow and balance.
• This project is an interesting take on the project brief and it is a nice step towards learning gameplay animation. I wish there was more detail in the documentation that explains the process of the project, as the documentation is quite lacking at the moment. When it comes to using 2D animation as references, we have to be mindful of how we can translate it into 3D so that it looks good while still conveying the same feeling. I like the motion of the arms in the run but this 3D model has long legs, so it would benefit from the hips being a bit more raised above the ground and rotating the chest control a bit more downwards. Be mindful of the foot placement during the run – usually the foot during a sprint lands underneath the hips rather than further forward, you can see that in your reference as well. So make sure to reproduce that in your animation. Currently, the head seems almost stationary, so I would add just a little bit of translation in the hips. The angle of the reference that you have used for the slide is not great, so you cannot correctly see his stance but realistically, the knees of your character should be spread more, the hips should be lower and her torso should be leaning backwards to create momentum as otherwise it looks like she is just sitting. During loops like this, you should always offset the different body parts to create overlap as everything moves at the same time from point A to point B at the moment, which is especially visible in the arms in the form of twinning (that happens when legs or arms move in the same way at the same pace in similar poses). The pose of her arms needs to be stronger as well as it looks very doll-like at the moment. You can record your own reference to see what you want her stance and that move to look like – recording your own references is very good practice and something that most animators in the industry do (as long as it is safe to do so). For the idle variation she is still meant to be firmly on her knees. I would make sure to avoid her knees moving by not rotating the hips or only very subtly while anchoring the knee controls to their locations in some manner. The spin (which I am considering “release” and “recovery”) is nice. Currently her going from the slide pose to grabbing the sword with both hands happens very quick and is quite linear. I would work on that further and exaggerate it a bit. I would then slow down the sword coming down to the ground further to emphasize the weight. During the spin and at the first instance she lands, I would make sure to add a nice curve in her back to strengthen the line – her feet should be coming down while her arms are still planted on the ground. You can look up gymnasts doing front walkovers to use as a reference. When she rises up on her feet, her torso should still be bent backwards a bit to continue selling that line of action and the overlap in her body parts. The “recovery” section at the moment is too short and her feet sort of slide back into place for the run – in order to continue running, there should be a transitional animation between the “recovery” and the run in which she takes at least two steps to get back into the running cycle. A further step for this project once the animations have been improved would be to include root motion as that would really sell the project and tie all the animations together. It will especially help sell the slide, as it is hard to imagine it with forward movement at the moment. Overall, I would continue working on this project as I think it has potential and seems like a great opportunity to learn a lot of good gameplay animation practices! Best of luck.