Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Hey, Good start overall, I think you need to polish your fundamentals. Right now everything just floats from pose to pose. Nothing is offset also so looks very robotic. I would do a range of bouncing balls heavy - light, this will help you understand the spacing and weight a lot more, then come back to a full character. Work on weight shifts with just a ball and legs also, I think what you have is too basic and needs a lot of work. Learning the basics a bit more before a task like this would help you understand what's happening more in the movements :) Keep pushing you will; get there if you have the passion :)
• I was unfortunately unable to open the Maya files and therefore couldn't see the attack animation. **Idle** - Good overlapping animation through the spine and tail. - Loops cleanly with no snapping or odd tangents. Areas that could improve it: - A more dynamic pose would go a long way to making the creatures idle more compelling. The idle is a great way to convey the personality of the character, how they stand and the rhythm of their movements tells the player a lot about the state that they're in. When first starting on a character, our team finds that creating a series of poses can help us get into the mindset of the characters and use that to influence our animations. - Reducing the sway of the tail can give it a more muscular feel and add another potential weapon to the character's arsenal. - Watch out for twinning, our minds pick out patterns quickly, but by offsetting what the opposite hands/feet are doing can make animation more engaging to view. **Idle to powerup** - Offsetting the staff and foot so that the foot plants first, before the staff is driven down will add a lot more power to the movement. Really delaying the staff and upper body will again help here. - Working from the root out with an animation is a good way to get the weight and feeling of a movement before worrying about the nitty gritty stuff. The hips/root drives all our motion (unless reacting to external forces) and so by getting that to work, everything else will fall into place. - Sometimes, simply offsetting the keys up the spine and down the arms can help break up a linear blend to the next position. However, more often than not, when you notice a linear blend it generally highlights a lack of breakdowns between two keys. **Power Up** - Similar sort of issues here as with the previous animation. Feels like there are too few breakdowns between the major key frames. It depends on how you like to animate, but have a go at both pose to pose and animating straight ahead. If in pose to pose, then stick in blocking and stepped keys till the bitter end, keep adding breakdowns until the motion feels smooth in playback. Only then transition into splined keys, which if there are enough breakdowns should only require minor polish. Alternatively animating straight ahead, something I find helps me quickly get the feeling of animation, is to focus purely on the hips/root. Almost treating it like a bouncing ball, but it allows for quick iteration on the spacing and timing. I then start building out with the legs and then up the spine. The arms, I can leave till the end as all of their motion is initially driven from the root or chest. There's plenty of resources out there, that will go a lot more in-depth and hopefully be of benefit to yourself. Focused work and practice is the key for animation, it's incredible the progress people can make in even a month, let alone 6 - 12.