Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Really cool piece, make sure to pay attention to the sliding feet. The weight on the character feels pretty good and the attack motions are nice.
• 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. About the idles - in my opinion you made too much amplitude on the chest, hands and shoulders. It feels like he's floating. The timing would be more natural if you phased the acceleration and deceleration to the keyframes. Right now the timing is too even. I would recommend reducing the amplitude and breaking up the squats with small body movements. The charge phase looks a bit strange, it doesn't feel like a reference of a real spear attack is used. The king strikes quite spectacularly, but don't forget about realistic body mechanics, even if it is sped up in time, keep track of the character's weight transfers. The blow itself looks good, the blow is spectacular and beautiful. Overall you have a good sense of composition and line of movement.Thank you for a great job!
• Overall this is a really promising set of animations. Some of the strongest areas for me are your attacks, with some good action lines and telegraphing going on. The first sweeping attack in particular is working well, with the timing of the attack feeling very satisfying. I can see your inspiration from dynasty warriors in it, and think it suits this style of game well. I would say the areas you could work into more are the more subtle areas of animation. Think about how the character supports themselves with actions such as your release/return to idle. Currently the king moves his left front leg first, however this leg is taking his bodies weight so it would be more natural to move his right leg first here. Sometimes I find it helpful to act out the action myself, to check what feels best to do. In a similar fashion on the idle variation, I think you could work on the weight shift of the body as he moves his right leg forward. With your idle animation, I appreciate that you’ve emphasized the movements, as often these can be lost when you get the animation in game. I think the way you’re moving the chest could be worked into, consider how the different areas of the torso work and move together during the breath. I would also think about adding some subtle side to side action with the body over each foot to give it more variation. Keep an eye on pose matching between the different animations so you don’t get popping, and try to keep the feet from sliding in areas they should be planted, such as at the end of the second attack on the left foot. Studio library is free software for maya that can be useful when matching poses, with other uses being things like creating hand poses or facial poses for instance to a library so you can add them easily to your animation. https://www.studiolibrary.com/
• Impressive poses. Love the idle pose, it shows that he's ready and is quite powerful. The timing is quite nice as well. Love the arc on the weapon release. There's some nice posing on the release animation and I love how there's a follow-through on the upper body. It looks disconnected and broken but, it works perfectly. I think Jin from Tekken 3 has one move where does like a Tornado Down kicks where his legs are moving first and the upper body follows it on a delay which looks like he's breaking his spine almost. I think there're a few things that can be done to take this animation to another level. The first thing that caught my eye was the Disconnect on the Idle Variation. It doesn't loop back to the idle 1 quite well and looks like a pop. Make sure to get the Idle Variation's end and the start as same pose as Idle 1 so it loops smoothly. The second thing that caught my eye is that everything is moving at the same time for idle animation. It makes it look floaty and less organic. I feel like on the breathing we could adjust the timing on the limbs within the actual breath timings. It'll make it look more natural and we can even play around with graphs here for the limbs. Especially in the Charge Idle loop, we could easily make it loop smoothly using graphs. There're quite a few bits with foot slidings but I think you mentioned that the root motion wasn't working cause the Bone wasn't in the right place, so that might be the reason why it's making the foot slide. Overall, I think your posing is nice along with timing. Just need some tweakings in the graph and some poses to make this piece look amazing.
• Overall decent piece of work that I believe could have shined if given more time. Really solid grasp of root motion, object interaction and Unreal implementation. The timing and the weight of the release are good. I like how the release can flow into itself to create consecutive attacks – it works really well. I also think the recovery works nicely. The idle is decent but one thing to always remember is to offset limb movement by 2-4 frames (depending on the speed of the animation) as the hands look twinned at the moment, which we want to avoid. I think the first half of the idle variation works nicely with good timing but the return from it back to the main idle pose could have done with a further breakdown and overlap as currently all body parts move back at the same time. The final pose of this transition does not seem to fully match the idle pose so there is a ‘pop’ in the animation there – make sure that it fully blends back to the idle pose. The charge is another animation that would have done better with a breakdown as currently it seems to be animating between just pose A and pose B. There could have also been an offset between hips, chest, hands and head. I like the timing on the way to pose B and the hold around it but it goes too fast back to pose A – the loop at the beginning/end of the animation needs to be smoothed out. The research and development is lacking in some sections, the project would have shined with more planning and exploration (storyboard or explanation of the exact planned sequence; moodboards; composition exploration) as well as a more artistic approach - the character is currently lacking personality, which could have been improved with stronger posing. The lighting and camera work in the presentation are also not great, making the animations harder to properly see. If you work on the aforementioned points, I believe you could have a strong showreel piece.
• This is a very solid presentation. You have a good sense of strength to the attacks, but I would like to see the halberd affecting the character's movement more. It currently feels too light. It would be great if you could think about emphasizing the weapon's weight by adjusting the character's poses. Other minor feedback - everything is moving at the same time during the idle - try offsetting arms, try dragging/delaying body parts. Same with the idle variation - the feet in particular look like they are drifting, as opposed to supporting the character's weight. the attitude is great though. Overall, very impressive stuff, and those attacks should look great on your showreel. Good work!
• Lovely introduction to the documentation, giving us the knowledge on your previous experiences and how you plan to push yourself in this project; this shows your passion for wanting to improve in your animation skill and get out of your comfort zone! I would have liked to have seen a bit more exploration in different rigs and models so we can see how you got to the decision of using the Ancient King, but this is just a small bit of feedback! Absolutely great references you’ve gathered here, some from already animated pieces and games along with an awesome real life reference video of someone explaining and using a halbert. To push your reference a tad bit further which could help making your animation, is to record yourself, then you have the exact sequence you are going to create in a video too! You approached the blocking stage of the animations really well, creating your Keyframes first and then adjusting the timings of these to get the desired outcome, then doing another pass on these frames to make sure you are pushing the poses! Exceptional work here, and it’s good you’re taking advantage of the graph editor too which is a very powerful tool to fine tune your animations! Great to see you troubleshoot the Root Motion problem and find a quick solution, this shows you have great knowledge on the tech side of things too, which is a huge plus! It’s refreshing to see you do a reflection on the project as well, seeing what you need to improve for your next project; superb job on self critiquing yourself. A few things that I think will help you next time you work on a project like this is to create a priority list and gantt chart, this will allow you to figure out what the main parts of the projects are and then have some nice-to-haves tasks if you have some extra time. The gantt chart will help you figure out when you need to move onto the next stage and allows you time manage with clearer goals. You seem to have great knowledge on each step of the animation implementation and creation process, so it should be easy for you to come up with time estimates at each stage! The animation is incredible Wimula, something to be really proud of! The idle feels really nice and we can sense that this Ancient Warrior is ready for combat. Some small feedback on the animation, I would recommend animating with a ground plane next time in 3DS since in Unreal we can see the halbert clipping into the ground a tiny bit. Also watch out for the chest, it seems to sink into the character body a bit too much, the movement is great but the rotation might just be a tad bit too extreme when he breathes out! Then to push this idle to the next stage, which you have reflected on in the documentation, you could have the character look around their environment so we can get a sense of alertness from them since they’re on a battlefield! Then the last smaller detail is just having a bit of movement on the fingers too, these updates are more on the polish side of things, so I can understand it could have been affected by time constraints! The Alt Idle is great, showing off that this Warrior is ready for a battle, good sense of attitude and experience coming from this taunt. My main feedback is on the feet movement, the first foot coming over feels a bit stiff and linear, rotate the foot down slightly on the lift. Then have the foot lift a bit quicker and then slow down on the apex of the lift to a quick stomp down. This will help show the audience that this character is the strongest Warrior and he knows what he is doing! When the character is then going back to idle, add a small bit of settle when they get there so the motion doesn’t stop so suddenly, making them blend in and out smoothly! Also a tad bit of popping from the transition from Alt Idle to regular Idle. The Charge up animation feels great in game! You just know that devastating strike is about to come from this charge up, with the posing and the slow twist down. I would recommend having the weapon tilt down a small bit too, allowing us to also feel the weight of the weapon and raising the Left Hand so it is a bit closer to the neck of the halbert for a stronger silhouette. Fantastic timing on the first attack, the spin around feels weighty, realistic and has great body mechanics; the timing is perfect as well, going from a slow spin as they’re pulling the weapon to a fast slash! That would be my feedback for the final strike, the timing could be sped up a bit on the big swing down to really help push that final hit! Also watch out for the broken wrist on the Right Hand when the final strike lands as it looks a bit too bent when holding a heavy weapon, relaxing it a bit by rotating it under the pole will help! Good recovering animation too as we can feel the character lurching up after this big strike, I would just switch the foot movement though so we lift the back foot into position first and then the front foot. This is mainly because we have a lot of weight on the front foot and as humans we tend to do the easiest thing first which will be to lift the lighter foot first! Wow Wimula, an incredible animation here and it blew me away when I saw it! Great use of the technical side of things too and it was nice to test it out in-game too. You should keep pushing this animation piece and do another polish pass on it after feedback as this is a strong showreel piece! I look forward to seeing more work from you!
• Hi Wimula! Hope you are doing well, Thank you for participating in the Search for a Star Competition! Feedback: Good research on reference and character style Strong Poses Good timing Minor fixes: foot sliding, weight shifts and the recovery could be quicker. Recommended links to boost your animation skills: Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL0_ccwcqFA&ab_channel=Jean-DenisHaas Breaking Down Attack Animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LewXWM7HDd8&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Too Much is Just Right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNBKzLzDKtM&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames Assigning Animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV8xIP480qk&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames How to Push Your Animation Poses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWVD7pwDpJA&t=1s&ab_channel=AnimSchool Weight in Animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3oIxjzdMqY&ab_channel=AlessandroCamporota 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
• Some good solid weighting and timings for these animations. The dynamic camera could maybe benefit from some additional polish perhaps? A good, solid submission.
• Excellent Work .. Nice implementation and a great overall feel .. Recomendations -- - The Charge state is the weakest of your animations and a more obvious 'intesify' just before release would have helped. - Really nice spin release and secondary swipe, but a bit of love on both the transition into the charge (rather than a direct blend) and the noticable pose mismatch at the end of the idle variation-> idle would help. - Would have liked to see a little more weight to the weapon (as its very 'front heavy' but doesn't feel it) , but has nice momentum. - Dont forget the nuances of hand / finger and head movements.