Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Hi Brandon Chadwick! Hope you are doing well, Thank you for participating in the GradsinGames Competition! My Feedback: Congratulations on rigging your character! Rigging is a big plus. Some studios require animators to know how to rig a character and you know blueprints. You are two steps ahead! Well-detailed documentation, where you explain step by step your timetable, blueprints, and your animation studies. This shows me that you are organised and you plan your way ahead of time to prevent any unwanted obstacles. I like your walk-cycle and your run-cycle but I feel it's missing a bit of personality in your animation. I recommend filming yourself and becoming the character. Imagine her reactions and her feelings. How would the character behave in certain environments? I know you went through some tough moments with rigging and importing animation to Unreal and you find your way through. Everyone has their ups and downs but we should never give up. Don't be afraid to start your animations from scratch when you feel stuck or you have some weird rotations or bugs. You are faster and more efficient the second time. You are honest. This helps build a strong connection with your colleagues and give feedback or share ideas. Follow your goals! Can't wait to see your future projects!
• Overall, the animations were great, but here's some feedback to give: Idle animations - Great upper body animations. it could be improved by having some movements on the upper leg area, perhaps swaying it can help make the lower body feel more lively. Running - arms feel stiff, having an exageration on the arm movement can help make the run feel more dynamic. Sword Attack - the sword looks like it is going to go off the hands, take care to ensure that the handle of the sword doesnt have too much movement. the sword is also goes out too much during the thrust, this gives an overlean which makes the sword does not feel part of the overall animation. a shorter thrust whill help make it more impactful. Overall the foundation is there, so good job! the points above are just some smaller adjustments that can be hard to notice with a second pair of eyes so do not worry!
• First of all, good job on undertaking such an ambitious project and doing thorough scoping for it! That is a very valuable skill to have. However, I believe that the scale of the project was a bit ambitious and you strived to achieve more than what the brief was meant for. That resulted in the focus of the project shifting onto creating a full set of player-controlled locomotion and the challenges that come with that rather than focusing on the creative aspect and few but polished animations (idle – charge – release – recovery). The way you tackled the technical challenges of the rig and Unreal is excellent. If you enjoy this side of things, then that is great and you can work towards becoming a great technical animator by learning more about rigging, Maya tools, scripting and Unreal – the industry certainly needs more technical animators and they are highly valued. But if you are to try your hand at focusing on animation, I would suggest first making sure that you find a good rig that already has everything you need so that you can get straight into animating – I suggest looking up Agora Community, Matheus Lima, Kiel Figgins and Emilio Serrano. Some of their rigs are great and I think they would be useful to you even if you just want to see how they are set up as rigs, if you want to get more into rigging. I like your idle animation and idle pose, they manage to convey the attitude that you seem to have intended for the character. I believe the walk is at a good level – I’d say the torso needs a little bit more rotation and there is a jitter with each step that is seen in the upper body that should be smoothed out. The jog and the charge – recovery – release would need further work to bring them to a polished level. The gap between her feet during the run is too wide – the feet should land a lot more centrally underneath her hips. The torso also needs quite a bit more rotation as it is currently too static for that amount of movement. I would try to find jogging references and analyse the timing, movement and rotation of each body part in them. For the charge – release – recovery states, rather than looking at vague inspirations, I would try to find references for the exact motion you have in mind (you could even record your own reference, just don’t do anything dangerous!) and use it to create strong poses as a base and go from there. As you said, this seems to have been a great learning opportunity for you to see what areas you enjoy working on and I hope my feedback/advice has been valuable!
• First of all Really love your Document. Super detailed. Love how you went through planning and pre-production. It’s another thing if you’re able to follow it or not. It’s all about learning new things whether it’s animating or time management. It’s amazing to see your journey to learn Rigging and texturing in Maya. It’s really important to find something that you enjoy and you clearly got it for technical animation. Coming back to animation, I think your idle is quite nice. Although at the moment it looks a bit static and to improve it we could add subtle movements in arms. Especially this pose is a bit Quiet so, to add life to it we could add facial animations, breathing, and some finger movements too. Your walk animation is quite nice as well. The thing that caught my eye was the torso. From the front view it looks like it needs some graph tweaking or adding some poses on the torso because at the moment it feels a bit shaky which sometimes is a result of not animating the torso. The timing on the run animation is nice but I feel like the character in whole lacks a bit of energy/ personality. That could be improved by adding some nice dynamic or extreme posing. As you've mentioned about Nier, their idle animations are subtle but their run is really readable and very powerful. The same goes for the attacks. The anticipation pose before the dash attack is working but I do feel like we could make it powerful. It would be nice to get some cool Attack references for it and see how the upper torso moves before the dash attack. I think your arm is moving quite separately from the body. It looks like it doesn’t have any impact on the torso. Remember that everything in our body is connected to each other. If you move your arm, you’ll see that it impacts your shoulders, your chest and the pelvis too even if it’s a subtle impact on pelvis. Overall, I think your technical knowledge is really good and the industry needs technical animators. Regarding the animation, I feel like working on your poses, making it dynamic, and making it readable will definitely help you. The timing is there, I think it’s more about poses and readability.
• 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. Idles is good at posing and timing. The only thing that would be great would be to make an animation of pulling out a weapon when switching to a battle idle. The gait looks good, except that it is honest, there is a chance that you phased the body with forward kinematics, which is difficult. In running unfortunately you can't feel the weight, plus the legs are under-phased. But she runs feminine, stylistically well done. Thank you for a great job!
• First off, I just want to say that it was so refreshing and incredible reading your documentation. I felt like I have walked through every step of the project with you and the way it was written felt really personal and reflective! It is always difficult to pace yourself when you have full control over a project and can do basically whatever you want, but similar to what you said, you don’t know if it’s too much or too little and struggle to find that satisfying stopping point. I still run into these issues now :( but what I found that helps me hugely is creating a gantt chart, this allows me to plan week to week and figure out if my scope is too big. I love the rest of your planning, setting the priority of the animations and figuring out the most important ones to make but the gantt chart will really help next time to manage your workload and have clearer “mini” goals to meet weekly. Moving on to your research, Nier: Automata is a great reference and this video helps you see each animation more clearly along with the Fire Emblem game too, it was great to see you have some reflections on these videos too so we can see more of what you’re thinking! It would have been good here to have thought about what attack animation in particular you wanted to make, you did mention later on in the documentation that you used SwordArtOnline’s “Flashing Penetrator” attack but having a clear idea or rough idea of what attack animation you want to create earlier, will allow you to find similar moves in your references such as Nier: Automata meaning you to have more references on how you want you animation to look! On to Week 3, this is just amazing Brendon, it is great that you created your own rig and using plugins such as Advanced Skeleton helps speed up the process, this is a lot of work and it’s great to see the documentation on it; especially seeing you reflect on some issues such as binding the sword and reaching out to people for help. This shows that you're comfortable with confronting challenges and are not shy to speak up when you need help, so great job here! Week 4 is great, you’ve looked at Unreal versions to avoid issues and you’ve imported in your character along with setting up the systems, your technical approach is brilliant! We then have Week 5 / 6 where you have the Christmas break and working on group project, it was great that you’ve noted all this and it can be difficult jumping back and forth between projects and holidays but you’ve done a good job and you managed to fix the broken rig too along with some quality of life updates for your Maya scene as well as learning new things such as the texture setup in Maya. Week 7 was very busy week for you and you got a lot of work done in this time frame, you said that you had some issues with some jittering and you did some good troubleshooting with using animation layers and then trying to bake down the animation and smooth it out rather than just giving up on it! You said that you duplicated the animation file for the combat walk and adjusted it slightly, which is a great use of time, but what I recommend next time is to create an animation layer that has the new combat pose on it. This will save time on working with the base animation layer and still give you the same rhythm of the regular walk, since the walk cycle is brilliant and a cracking good base animation! For Week 8 when you started working on the Attack sequence, I would recommend dropping in the reference video or some strong key pose images into the Maya scene so you can rotoscope these strong poses since Anime has great silhouette keyframes! Again, fantastic job and the technical implementation, something to be really proud of! You also said that you were not too happy with the attack animation, in these sorts of circumstances try not to disparage yourself. I can understand that the deadline and technical implementation at the same time is very tough. What I recommend next time is to do some quick block out tests to get the sense of timing and the strong keyposes in. Prototyping is really useful to get an understanding of how you want the animation to look and feel; so creating multiple quick animation tests, you can start to figure out what one you like the most to avoid the issue of cleaning up something you’re not too happy with! I’m also sorry to hear that you ran into some rig issues when revamping the attack animation, some things I can recommend to help avoid this issues in the future is to first set up Incremental saving in Maya, this will create a checkpoint everytime you save, so if something break you can go back and open up that file! Also you can Reference in your rig to the Maya scene, therefore if the rig decides to break on you, you can Reload the reference file which 99% of the time will work! A delightful retrospective on the project, and it really feels like you’ve learnt a lot from the assessment and what to focus on for the future. It’s refreshing to see so much emotion and reflection on your work, which allows us to feel how much passion you have for animation overall! I’m sorry to hear that you were not happy with the outcome but I think you really should be, this is an incredible feat to have managed by yourself and you have learnt a lot of things about animation and yourself, which you should be proud of! Onto the animation! The implementation of everything in UE5 is superb and being able to run around with the player pawn feels great! The idle is really nice and the fidget of the character looking around has some really good arms motions which are fluid and natural. The one thing that sticks out to me a bit is when you look at the idle pose from the side of the character, it feels a tad bit off centre of mass and a bit unbalance; a quick fix for this would be to add an animation layer and rotate the hips up and the torso slightly forward, giving a more natural pose for the character when standing. The regular walk cycle is terrific, the motion of the hips is smooth and feels natural, walk cycles are difficult to make and you’ve done a fantastic job here! A small detail that would push this walk cycle a bit further is to have more of an impact on the chest when each step lands, similar to the beginning of the Nier: Automata reference you used, this will help the character feel more ground and weighty! You have it slightly on the head but now just needs to be transferred to the torso of the character. This is the same feedback for the running cycle too, your arm motions in the animations are great though, some lovely arcs and follow throughs! Great job on the combat locomotion too, similar feedback to the previous one but one thing I recommend is to gather some references of yourself or a friend doing this motion, then you can really feel what is natural and the motions of how the body works when walking and running; this will help push your posing to the next level! Outstanding job on getting the attack to work in the engine as well, I saw that you use the Launch Character node which is a great node to use. For this instance, to really show off your animation, it would be good to use Root Motion on the animation; this will allow you to control the attack much more and feel more natural since you can control how far the character moves in you animation file rather than having to animate to the Launch Character node instead. This is more technical feedback rather than animation but I hope it can help for future projects! For the attack animation, I really feel the lunge of the character coming through and could see stab through an enemy in the game and how it seamlessly flows back into the run cycle. To help push this animation further, when we do motion like this, we tend to lead with the hips first to help us thrust our upper body forward. The reference video from SAO is good but due to how it’s animated, it is difficult to figure out what the body motions are since they are hidden with camera angles; gathering some reference of yourself doing this motion will really help you understand the motion of the whole body when doing actions like this! Overall Brendon this is an incredible piece of work and you’ve put a lot of effort into the technical side which is hugely appreciated. It was great to see your insights through the documentation and your reflections on each step of the project and the final outcome is superb! Seeing your interest through the project leading more into Technical Animation is exactly what you want when you finish a big project like this, seeing what you enjoyed the most so you can start catering more towards that field. Magnificent work on this project Brendon and I’m eager to see what you have in store next!
• The Idles are ok, though lots of foot sliding between different poses, so ideally you would adjust the feet to match or have additional anims to accommodate this and smooth out the transitions. Might benefit from a more 'neutral idle pose with into and out of walks/runs. There are some issues with the run and attack anims re. their posing and weight, which would benefit from some further polish and observation from other run cycles/attacks etc.
• Reading your documentation it came across how you were enjoying the planning and technical aspects of the project. From an outside perspective, I wonder if you enjoyed the animation less due to where it fell in the year and with other things that you were pulling you in different directions. So I would say to not be too hard on yourself, you accomplished a lot and I think your animations overall are looking good. You’ve got a lot of nice subtleties coming across in the animation, such as the drag on the hands on your idle fidget, and I think the character you were going for is coming across in your walk cycle which is great to see. With cycles it’s good to check you’ve got an equal amount of movement on both sides of the body. I often start with animating one side first, and then copying and flipping (or offsetting for legs) the motion onto the opposite side. Studio library is free software for maya that can be useful when matching poses, but can also mirror poses and animation. https://www.studiolibrary.com/ I use the graph editor when animating to have a visual representation of the keys, and you can also scale groups of keys there to create the opposite side for cycles. If you go into the options button for scaling, then change the ‘value scale’ to -1, that should flip any keys you have selected, so that might be worth experimenting with. I tend to put my keyframes on the extremes of movements also and not rely on the curves in the graph editor for these so that both sides of the body are equal. Richard Williams has a great book called The Animators Survival Kit which breaks down cycles really well, you can also find a lot of the images from the book online. Animating a run in heels is a bit trickier than with flats. I can’t run in them myself but looking at videos online it looks like you still want to try and plant the foot after the impact, which will give you more purchase to push off from as the leg leaves the floor. With more stylized feminine cycles I often keep the legs closer together while they’re in the air, even crossing the leg behind 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, more towards what you have for the walk cycle. With your attack, 2Bs animations really push the speed of the attacks and have large settle anims in contrast. It can be good to get into an attack quickly so it feels satisfying to the player. I would also make sure your characters weight feels balanced while they’re doing these sorts of actions.