Creating the animation

It was great that I got to bring out Drake again and use him on another project, I loved developing him and it allowed me to try and learn even more of 3D animations possibilities, especially when putting it together with after effects, the results can be tremendous, as you see in modern day cinema.

Since creating this animation I have received my mark for the 3D character module, I attained a high 2.1 but there was some flaws in my project which was to be expected being my first ever 3D character. There was some movements that were not quite right, such as not enough bend in the feet when he walks and some crossover between his arms or his chest, so I was very careful to try and avoid things like this in this animation. I was also told that it is important to reflect more on my work, especially on it's weaknesses so I have tried to do that more this time on this blog.

The short fighting sequence included, a short idle introduction where the character is standing looking around biting his nails. Then he jumps into the air for a bit of comedy reference to the Matrix in the hope people will relate to this and find it funny. Then he shows of a few of his moves in reference to Super Smash Bros, his Smash moves and the most exciting Super Smash as a final move. Effects will be added after in After Effects.

Because of the characters action constraints and well rigged skeleton, he was very easy to manipulate, but the placement of the key frames is a tricky business. The copy position in Blender is a very useful function indeed, you can use it to copy a pose from one side of the body to another or the whole body pose to another key frame, it speeds things up a lot. The NLA editor was useful to join different animation sequences together and then to animate the camera over the top of those animation sequences to create the whole sequence. Some of the character movements are a bit off, this was my first ever character model and in the future more professional meshes will be created. I have learnt a lot from developing this model and using it for different purposes.

I short fight sequence with the drake duck character was created. It was created for part of the final video sequence in the effort to make the video more varied and exciting. The main aim of this project was to create a physical game based on a particular video game as closely as possible and creating a lot of material to go along with it and to create that material and put it together in different ways to also create a show reel type project.

Programs used: MS Word, Paint and Excel, Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Blender and Windows Movie maker. Photoshop was the main component for creating the digital artifacts for the game.

This is a simple animation but character animation is very time consuming and this took a while in itself, although considered complex enough for it's purpose. Different lighting was used to make the model look more like a game character model and his movements reflect the movements of similar characters in the video game.

The detailed information of how this character was created can be found on the whole profile or henerz2011.blogspot.com

If this animation was to be made better, the timing of some of the movements and amount of detail in the movements could be improved. For instance the punches are rather slow and don't show enough force, this could be fixed with a lot of playing around with the key frames. The finishing move was deliberately slow for a build up effect.