Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• 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 project looks beautiful! Very nice location, and congratulations on setting up your first gameplay. You didn't finalise the stat machine for the transitions between running and picking up, it's noticeable, but from my point of view, it looks very decent. In terms of animation, the beastie needs to be more flexible and plastic in general. For example the tail and jumping. Overall it moves a bit stiff. I would recommend you to watch wild animal references beforehand when creating animations in the future. You just need to pay more attention to the packaging of animation, and the search for body balance. Thank you for a great job!
• Very impressive !
• Hi there, thanks for your submission. You've put a lot of good work into this, and it is really impressive how much you have implemented! Putting animations directly into a games engine, being able to control a character and see how the animations fit together is a fantastic way to understand and improve your animation skills. Showing them off like this gives you a real advantage as a junior animator applicant. For the animation itself, you've chosen a very difficult camera angle if you want to show the character itself. By locking the camera and character together, we only every see one perspective. Perhaps think about ways to frame the character when certain actions are happening. At the moment the only time we see the character is on the roof at the end, which is by far my favourite animation, and should possibly be right at the beginning. Overall the animations feel very stiff, with barely any change in silhouette. Think about contrasting poses, squash and stretch, and remember we work in 3 dimensions. Twist the torso, overlap body parts. You might be doing all these things, but I'm afraid it's so subtle that it's nearly impossible to see what's going on. Based on your submission, I'd suggest focusing a lot more on your character animation skills, since you clearly have a good handle on the more technical side of game animation. The idle on the roof shows you can create good, characterful animation, but put more of this into your in-game work. Overall, I liked the simple story and goal you set, and I think you achieved your ambition with aplomb. Congratulations on a strong submission!
• Leona Hi Leona! Hope you are doing well, Thank you for participating in the GrandsinGames Competition! Feedback: I enjoyed playing your mini-game! I can see that you are a good planner and a skilful artist based on your presentation. You manage to incorporate collectables, wall climbing, and completion scenes all together with your animations. This was quite a task and you did it very well. I recommend implementing some real-life creature references for your animation to build a strong understanding of their weight and movement. This will build a more believable character. Think of appealing and clear silhouettes from the player's point of view and if applicable in 360. Feel free to add personality to your character. This will build a stronger connection with the player. Keep up the great work!! Looking forward to seeing your future projects! 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 Make the Impact https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIB0BUe6Ihk&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Attack Poses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99gdMDF7V2E&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames
• You’ve accomplished a lot with this project and really pushed yourself with the technical set up, so congratulations on making a working game with so many animations. I like your take on the theme as well, that a hero doesn’t need to be fighting. You gave yourself a big task with undertaking a quadruped as they can be quite tricky. I’ve used Eadweard Muybridges slides a lot to help with how animals walk and run. He has a book about it, but you can also find a lot of the images of it online. The book is called Animals In Motion though if you’re interested. I think the animations would benefit from making sure that the limbs aren’t moving at the same time as each other to make them more fluid. With cycles as well 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 often use the graph editor when animating, 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 like the little looks you’ve got on the head for the alternate idle, it helps give the feeling of an animation and adds a lot of character. Bear in mind how the IK is affecting the front legs in the air to make sure they don’t get too pinned in place. I tend to keep the legs in FK when they’re off the ground for extended periods so that they stay nice and loose, but this methodology isn’t for everyone. Getting some overlapping action on the tail would also be nice, I tend to do this last when animating as the movement of the body will effect how it moves (in case there are any changes).
• This project is based on a thoughtful creative concept. However, it seems a lot more focused on game design/level design rather than animation and does not seem to focus on the animation project brief, which is what it is being judged against. The purpose of this game animation challenge was to focus on implementable game animations rather than creating a game demo. I do not see evidence of any intention to create ‘charge’, ‘release’ and ‘recovery’ animations that were meant to be the focus of the project according to the brief (alongside an idle state) Regarding what this project does have, it is good that you demonstrate ability to fully implement animations in an Unreal project but the locomotion animations need a lot of work to start approaching studio-level quality and unfortunately I have no permission to access the reference footage to be able to judge whether it was suitable. It is hard to give feedback about the locomotion system as not much of it is visible since you only see the back-view of the character and the silhouette of the movements is not clear and readable from that angle. The ending cutscene is charismatic and presents good timing and conveys emotion but the movements need to flow better as they seem a bit robotic at the moment.
• Nice result.The anim set itself is quite limited, but the UE work alongside is very strong and they have created a good quality submission.
• Some lovely exploration in the documentation, looking into the world that the character will live in will make it much easier to convey and animate a character when you have a sense of the back story. This takes time to do but you’ve done an incredible job and looking into this has made the character and world feel well connected! One thing I would have loved to have seen was more of the investigation when looking at what rigs to use and the different levels you looked into as well, you have stated that you looked into different assets and testing but we don’t see any documented. Other than that, the detailed look into the concepts of the world and character is fantastic! Setting out the priorities for the animations is a great way to sort out between your highest priority animations to your nice-to-have ones, you said later on in the documentation that you struggled with time management a bit, what could you do in this section of the planning is to have a gantt chart which will allow you to note down what needs to be done and setting small weekly goals! It’s a great practice that you block out some quick animation to get them into the game as fast as possible, sometimes animations can work in Maya but once they’re in engine, there can be some issues or it doesn’t fit the game; so you’ve shown some great initiative here! Nice to see that you documented about running into some issues when the retargeting didn’t work which allowed you to learn more about implementation along with testing and playing around with new mechanics. Pushing yourself into seeing how these systems work, such as gameplay design, UI and particle effects will help you when you talk to multiple departments in a studio environment since you’ll have a better understanding of how their systems work which will allow you to get the best result when working on a feature; this is amazing knowledge to have! The cutscene is also great exploration and you have definitely done a superb job at making a playable game. When we’re working on a project or tasks, we need triple check the criterias that we need to meet to mark the task as done, what you’ve done is incredible work but I don’t see a “charge” “release” and “recovery”; I love the study into “Does Whatever a Hero Can” and what you’ve got from it is fantastic but I would recommend to read over the brief and to help meet the criteria! Superb job on making this game, it’s something to be really proud of and is an incredible Showreel piece! I love the details of making blendspaces and even looking into making climbing mechanics to get more of an animal feel, the technical side of the project truly is inspiring and you have gone above and beyond when presenting the work! For the idle animation, the pose is really good and the secondary animation on the scrolls and ear is so fluid and smooth which is very satisfying to watch. To help push this animation a bit further, you could have the heels breath up and down with the idle too so we can feel the full weight of the character. The running animation is great and in the third person camera we get the feeling of this animal scurrying around the level, it would have been great to have seen the secondary action on the scrolls and ears similar to what you did on the idle. The tail is a tad bit erratic in the running animation, it’s difficult to try and make something like a tail feel natural but what I recommend is to first find some reference videos of Red Pandas or an animal that has a similar tail to see how they react when running; another tip is to see where the bone is attached to and follow the same rotation but with a bit of a delay and you can do this all the way down the tail! This will give you more of an S movement on the tail when the character is running! The climbing mechanic is so cool and the animations and Blendspaces work really well, I have noticed in the Build that you handed in, that the scamper idle doesn’t work on the wall when idling. The animation of climbing up the wall feels great and helps the character feel versatile and fast. To take these animations to the next stage, it would be to give the fingers some more movement so they could spread out before latching onto the wall, helping us feel the claws digging into the surface! The jumping animation shows a clean difference from the running pose but there is not too much that goes on and I think that’s because the arms and legs are twinning (mirroring) so offsetting some of the limbs in the pose and delaying by a few frames will help this jump feel more natural.The final animation is so cute and really brings across the characters personality, and it’s a great way to close the game out, I love the knee tapping and it feels good to watch; my only feedback on this is halfway through the animation we get this transition which feels like it’s blending to a pose rather than natural falling to it, adding a small bit of overlap and follow through on the head and arms here will stop this issue! This project is incredible Leona and it seems like you’ve learnt a lot from this assessment which is great news. The technical implementation is refreshing to see and you even added BlendSpaces to smooth out the movements when walking around. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to watch your documentation videos as they were not accessible to me but the world building and passion in this project really comes across! Just make sure to keep a close eye on the brief to make sure you’re meeting all objectives. I really look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
• Overall a very technically proficient project. I would have liked to have seen more of the animation "in place" (maybe Maya playblasts) to properly review and feedback on them from a physical POV.