Animation Practice

This is a short animation of a martial arts kick animated from reference. With this, I really came to appreciate the importance of using reference. There are a lot of subtle movements in a kick that I was not aware of.  The Ninja Turtle rig seemed thematically appropriate. 

A run cycle animated from reference. I took great pains to ensure the movement of his arms and legs had weight and felt natural. I also made sure to respect his body shape, moving away from the reference and adjusting his arms slightly to avoid them clipping into his shell. I also got to do a bit of secondary action with his bandana. 

A short animation I did for fun of Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank tossing his wrench up into the air. I really wanted to practice using Blender's "constraint" tool in order to have him grab, let go, and grab his wrench again. It was a real technical challenge, but I am happy with the results. I also made sure to respect the wrench's weight, adding a some drag when he throws it and a bit of follow through whenever he catches it. 

A quick little animation of Daffy Duck ducking (heh) to avoid a ball being thrown at him. With this I wanted to try out a more exaggerated, cartoonish style of animation, similar to the classic Looney Tunes shorts. I had a lot of fun really stretching the poses as far as I could, and I think I achieved that cartoonish movement I was going for.

I wanted to have an attempt at creating a rudimentary playable character in the Unreal Engine. I created an idle animation as well as a run cycle animation in Blender, then exported them as FBX files and subsequently imported them into Unreal. As I'm still familiarising myself with Unreal, I made use of guides online to make use of Unreal's "Blueprints" system to import the character model and then attach the required animations.