The past weeks I have been working hard on getting the ability animations finished as well as implementing them into UE4. Everything is working well and the project is now ready for VFX work as well as optional animations.
Ultimate Ability
For the ultimate ability I was thinking of having the character jump up, throw her spear and making a magical cage appear where the spear lands. The cage will be added later in the VFX stage of the project, but the base animation is already finished at this point.
I will use this section to dive a little deeper into the process/pipeline of my project:
After deciding what idea I want to animate I first start off blocking out basic poses to create a general Idea of the move's timing as well as readability. During this process I will have my graph set to stepped and any part that's not clear enough will be broken down further.
Once the animation idea is clear in the block-out, I will move on to spline and work in the graph editor until the base movement looks good.
As soon as everything looks fine I move on to adding secondary motion by animating the shoulder pads as well as hair, feathers, dress etc.
I always try to get feedback on my animations as much as I can. For this animation specifically I received feedback from Jason Hendrich, a senior animator at Riot Games.
The first video was the animation before, and the second video is the animation after I received the feedback and improved it.
Before
After
Spin Ability
(Will probably be sped up and tweaked based on feedback received)
Buff Ability
Throw Ability