Tamarrion, post 8 (final week)

Apologies for being late with this post as I forgot about it in the midst of all the preparing and taking care of exhibiting at GGC. This is my 8th and final brief post on our Big Game development period of Tamarrion.

The last week of the project was more of the same from the week before. I continued cleaning our motion capture animation, and out of about 45 animations total, 18 animations for our boss and 15 animations for our main character made it into the version of the game displayed at GGC.

A part of the planned victory series of animations.

Something I spent a bit of time on in our last week that didn’t make it into our GGC demo in time was a short victory sequence. Partly taken from some old mocap footage given to us by our teacher, it was planned that our main character would slowly walk up to the corpse of the boss, stare at him for a bit and then kick him nonchalantly. As the animations for these were completed only in the last couple of days before GGC, our programmers did not have much time to put the sequence itself together in-game, and we decided to leave it out rather than show a very rough version of it.

Our placeholder run animation, taken from my female Link project.

I also spent a good part of the last week hand-animating a new run cycle for our main character. The run we’d received from our motion capture shoot hadn’t targeted well to our model, so we’d been using a run animation I’d created for my previous female Link character project as a placeholder. While the placeholder run I provided worked, it felt out of character for our protagonist as it was incredibly fast and there was a lot of wild movement in the upper body of the animation ill fitting a disciplined paladin. I spent the last days of this short development period doing my best to put together a new run cycle that better fit our character and our lead artist’s vision. While it’s not perfect and definitely could need more work, we’re happy with what we got.

The run cycle made specifically for the Tamarrion character in the last week of the project.

Other than that, the rest of my week involved more general polish of our animations overall, of which as mentioned I had managed to put together about 45 total for our respective characters.