Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• **Swim** - Take a look at some reference footage for a crocodile. Although the torso does sway side to side, the main power and drive that propells the creature forward, comes from the tail. - With this in mind, initially start your rotation side to side with the base controller of the tail. Duplicate this rotation down the tails controllers until all controllers in the tail are rotating together. From here look into looping animations using the pre/post infinity settings in Maya's Graph editor. With these applied to your tails rotations, select every tail controller apart from the root one and offset their keys by 1-2 frames, deselect the highest controller (one closest to the root) in your selection and offset the keys again by 1-2 frames. Continue doing this until you have offset every controller in the chain by 1-2 frames of it's previous one. - You should now have a fluid tail like motion. From here, it will be about playing around with these offsets to get a more muscular feeling from the motion. - The same goes the other way, up the spine to the head, but these rotations will be much more subtle than the tails. **Attack** - The motion is much better here in terms of what's driving the rest of the body. Applying the same technique as before and offsetting the keys down the chain, will help get the fluid motion through the creature. - Good use of squash and stretch on the surfacing jump and landing. Something that would help push this is to use what's known as a "moving hold" at the peak of the roots arc. So at the highest point of the creatures leap out of the water, the roots motion will ease in, almost hold at the top and then ease out before quickly dropping again. Think of a bouncing ball, where at the peak of its bounce it appears to hold in the air slightly, but is still in motion. - As this is happening, the rest of the body can be catching up to the roots motion. - Good motion with the tail after the spinning attack, much more fluid and believable. - The overall spinning attack is good. One slight improvement that could be made, is to have the sword remain straight as the creature spins. So when viewing from the front, if you were to track the tip of the sword, it would form a clean circle. The narrower that circle, the more piercing the attack. - The belly flop for the re-entry is a funny touch. The creature would likely submerge briefly before the boyancy of the water displacement would be able to lift it back up to the surface. To then transition back to the idle/swimming pose, have the head dip down and the rest of the body to follow using the offsetting of keys again. Having time to work on these shots is always a struggle, especially when you run into technical issues. It would be good to continue working on this shot, once you find some more time, even if it's only for practice. Hopefully, you will pick up a few bits that you will be able to apply to your next animation and keep building upon in the future.
• Hey, Good job overall, the main thing is overlap looks a bit stiff. If you smooth out the curves and offset them slightly on the tail especially it will bring it more to life. Also, a more generic animation set would of worked better here, In games, swimming is an extra thing added after you have the basic set is done and the character working nicely to the brief. Good job overall but a bit more polish and extra weight on the jump especially would help a lot here. Some attacks would have been nice also as he has the sword and is gaging for a attack animation. Keep pushing and it will be a nice piece to add more animations to :)
• Great to see a game character from multiple views, this is how we work in game animation. Great effort for a weeks work, some of the motions here were really good. Some feedback, we'd recommend you watch this video on overlapping action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgwGWE3CUhk The reason we're suggesting this is because some of the tail was really right and some of the tail action we felt like was wrong. For example when the croc jumps up out of the water. Well done though, sorry you had so many problems with the ue4 implementation, Try deleting non deformer history on the rig.