Sword Swing Animation part: 3

Here is the final result of the Sword Swing animation. I'm pretty happy with it. I adjusted the timing for the arms, spent more time working with the left arm to make it look and feel more natural. I added in the facial expression, not my strongest area, but something I will be working on more and more over the next few weeks. I also added some color textures to the Goon's body to make it appear as if he was wearing a little leather underoos and some pieces of armor.

Sword Swing Animation part: 2

I have smoothed out the tangents and played with the timing. You may also note that I completed changed the character's Left arm. I did this because of the fact that the previous poses for this arm was floating a bit and had an instant where the arm did a 180 flip before grabbing onto the sword.. Which is always fun when that happens. On top of all of this the arm was a little to active, too much movement that was distracting from the overall action.

Now I need to add some slight movement to the fingers on the left hand so they don't appear to be so stiff. I also need to go through and add the facial expressions to finish of this piece.

Sword Swing Animation

I am currently working on a CG Animation of a the Goon Character model preforming a sword combat. The first steps I took were to study an individual swinging a sword with a purpose. I found Several good references on youtube and in several books. Once I had an idea of the direction I wanted the animation to take, I sketched out the key poses. Once the Key poses looked the way i wanted them I set up the scene in Maya and began to pose Goon in the the poses I had sketched, while keeping the Tangents in the graph Editor as Step Tangents. Once I was done here is what I ended up with:

This didn't look to bad. So i decided to make a few adjustments to the poses I had here and then start to add inbetweens to smooth out the larger motions and adjust the timing.

As you can see the Animation is coming along nicely. Now I need to change the Step Tangents to Spline Tangents and then clean up the tangents and smooth out the motion as we go. I'll post the finished animation when I am finished.

Dialog

I was going to do the March 11second club contest, but March was a really busy time for me and as such i put aside 5 days at the end of the month to animate the whole 11 seconds. Unfortunately, I should have given myself more time and only got four seconds done. So i cleaned these 4 seconds up and here they are.