Animation!
Finally, animation, most likely the hardest part of this project, considering my animation skills are incredibly limited, and I have not been taught anything regarding animation in my time. I started off by approaching what I wanted to do, and I settled on the idea of having O+ throw one of its teslas, as that would make sense for a sort of long attack motion. As a reference I used a video that was a tutorial about how to pitch a baseball shot, as I feel that type of action does convey a sense of strength and its also a bit more complex than just a simple animation like an idle or a run.
I animated in blender for this, and luckily my previous decisions in rigs made this whole process a million times easier for me, so im glad that I made the rigging choices that I did make. Especially with my decisions to parent bones on an offset, considering those can be moved freely and are not explicitly bound to the body, giving me maximum flexibility to work with, even including the ability to work with smear frames.
Here you can see my workflow for animation! My main consensus was to work on the main body for O+ first, before going and animating the suit as that needed more manual tweaking due to the design (armholes aligning with action, legs matching up with slot, etc.), this is quite noticeable from my action editor at the bottom. Interpolation works quite well for an instance like this, especially considering I have a complete lack of fundamentals when it comes to animation, so having the software interpret features such as inbetweens was a massive help for me to make this at a good speed.
However, I do wish that I had took snippets from the video itself and imported those into blender, that way I could possible have a much better and more accurate representation of what I should’ve done instead of just eyeballing it. I will attempt in my free time to recreate this action by using the video that I reference, but more directly using it. I think the main thing that bugged me the most about animation is how it didn’t look smooth, it was merely awkward. Of course that would be something that is fizzled out with time and experience but it does make me feel unnerved that this is meant to be AAA style work & workflow with choppy animation.
Render!!
With animation out of the way, it was time for me to render it out and call an end to this project! I did try making use of unreal for the animation, but I was having a lot of issues with assets and it was quite confusing. For some reason I’d import in my skeleton and mesh as an FBX, but when I would close unreal or restart unreal, even after multiple times saving, my model and skeleton would dissapear from my content browser, but all my textures and materials stayed put. It was really confusing and made it quite difficult to figure out what was going on with my render, especially considering that at some point in time the animation just stopped playing in the sequence editor. Even when I managed to get it to work and tried rendering it, there was an issue where my model would bounce up into the air, alongside with the suit, however that may just be due to the models not being anchored, but I can’t say for certain.
As a result, I had to abandon the premise of using Unreal for this project, and make use of blender. Now blender’s rendering engines is the only thing I will ever critique about blender. They can be used definitely, but it is a lot of meticulous tweaking and adjustment to get exactly what you need out of a render, I even struggled with it in Games Art Pipeline when I was rendering a character in Year 1. However, this time things went much smoother! I’m not exactly sure what changed, however, I felt the lighting this time round turned out much more dramatic, even if it was just a basic showcase of the character or its animaion.
Final Rendered Animation!
Last but not least, is the animation that I ended up rendering out. Whilst you can see my keyframing process above, you are unable to see the actual turnout of the animation in render. So here it is!
I am really happy with the lighting, however my concern is if it fits with the briefing of overwatch. Whilst the stylisation of eveything definitely does in my opinion, maybe the lighting is too harsh and lacks vibrancy. I am not sure at this moment, but I am still incredibly happy with the render, especially compared to last years result. Alongside this, the glass visor I made actually renders properly as glass, and not anything else, which is something I have been trying to figure out for years, and now I finally have!
In the end, I am quite happy with how O+ turned out, however, this specificially applies to only the main body for O+. I definitely feel like I could’ve done so much more work on its suit to make it match with that Overwatch level of detail. Whilst I’m happy I used height mapping in an efficient manner, hard modelling would’ve been so much more satisfying to construct. However I do also blame my simplistic design for the suit at the beginning of the project, as a lot more work should’ve been done on those thumbnails to make designs stand out more than others rather than subtle changes.
Alongside this, I was disappointed that I didn’t get to add the wiring in the final model. Whilst I had it all setup and layed out, I didn’t work on it as I should’ve, and that caused issues when it came to rigging and animation, for future reference however, any wires or coils will be modelled flat and then rigged into shape, thus making it easier for me to work with those types of models and features, as supposed to this project where I faced a lot of deformaties that I was unable to fix the weights for in the time that I had provided for this. Animation was also a reallly rough time for me, as mentioned I didn’t want to go for something simplistic, so I decided in the end to go for a more emotive and impactful motion, but it didnt feel that way. A lot more research needs to be done for animation or I will drop the skillset, considering its not a job I wish to apply for in the future, as my focus is in creation, not moving.
Thank you for reading! As of this point Year 2 is officially finished for me, I will be enjoying my summer but also working on preparing for 3rd Year, especially with my Final Major Project and Thesis coming up, its important to rest but I also need to lock in, happy summer!