Dialogue Animation

The last thing I had to work on was the dialogue animation and I picked a line from the Pirates of the Caribbean by Mr. Gibbs.
The way a approached this was to start working on the lip sync first and then, while listening to the audio, figure out the facial expressions and the language of the body of the character. I was very fortuned by choosing this audio, because a lot of the sounds and mimics were very similar through- out the audio so all I needed to do was to create a few and then just narrow down where the sounds were and copy them just before.
After I was finished with the lip sync, I started working on the body movement and the facial expressions. I tried to keep it fairlly simple and not to go overboard with it, because it's not suppose to distract the viewer to much, but at the same time keep it interesting and of course the animation had to be in keept with the actual audio file for it to work properlly.

Slide Animation

The final animation I had to work on for the team animatic and my personal animations was the slide animation.
I decided to create a slide animation, rather than a jump, because in my opinion the animatic was going to look boring and not very interesting. That's why I started working on a slide animation to break off the repetitivness of the animation and to work on something different. I didn't have too much troble creating and clipping off the slide animation and this is the final result I achieved with it.

Sneak&Shot Animations

I continued to work on my personal animations along side importing them to the scene for the final animatic. After I had created the run cycle, I started working on the sneak and the shoot animations.

I was encountering some problems with the sneak animations by trying to get the poses and movement right, so what I did was to gather reference by performing a sneak and taking a couple of pictures from which I could take reference. After that I saw where I was making mistakes with my sneak animations and adjusted it until I got the result I was looking for.

After I was finished with the sneak, I started working on the shoot animations, because in the cinematic they were going to be right after another and it made perfect sense to start working on it. With the shot animations I had a slight problem with the right forearm breaking when the animations was playing and he had to pull the arrow, but I resolved that by using the FK and starting the rotation from the shoulder, because the elbow was not facing the right direction before and after that was fixed everything was working fine.

In the image below you can see the how I have made use of the trax editor in Maya.

Animatic Animation: Run

I have started working on my final animations and the some of them will be put togheter in the animatic, which will be created with the team. In this post I will demonstrate how I have done my run cycle.
I have added the probs in this. The quiver and the arrows I placed on the back, created a locator which I parented to them and parented the locator to the back controller. I did a similar thing with the bow by parenting it to a locator and then the locator was parented to the hand controller, so when it came to animation it would be much easier, because they will follow the movement of the locator, which will follow the movement of the controller.
On the images bellow you can see a sequence of the run animation.

Push Animation

While I was gathering reference for the cinematic animations, I was working on the push animation. I used this animation to get use to the rig and the limitations of the character, so I would have a better understanding of it when it come to my final animations.

I did polish the animation, because I was using it mainly for studies, so I could make my final animations that I will submit and include in my cinematic.

Reference For Cinematic

Along side the animations I was doing, I was gathering reference for my final animations which I will use in the cinematic.

The best reference I found was from the game "The Last of Us". Considering there is a bow as a weapon and there is a lot of sneaking and stealth in this game, I found it very resourceful for my animations. In our storyboard for the cinematic, my character is a hunter and he is using a bow as a weapon, I picked this particular mission from the whole game called "The Hunt", because in it the character is hunting a deer and there are some very good poses and it's very similar to what I will use for my final animations.

I will be using these reference images for my run, stealth, shoot, slide, walk and jump animations from which the stealth, shoot, run and slide will be implemented in the final cinematic.

The other source I used for reference was "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug". In the movie there was a particular scene in the begging of the movie in which "Legolas" one of the characters, slides under a giant spider, which is very similar to what my character will do, except he will be sliding under a tree root and a fallen tree branch, not a giant spider.
After that he will crouch and shoot with his bow.

Walk Animation

After completing the idle animation for my character, I started working on a walk cycle, which I could implement in the final cinematic.
First, I just started working on the animation and very quickly I had walk cycle for my character, there were some slight issues with it and some things needed to be fixed. I realized that I forgot to animate the hips and character bouncing or going up and down, which made the character look very stiff and not very realistic. After those changes were made my walk cycle was finished.

I did a little research on the interned for some probs for my character, like a bow, quiver and arrow, which are important for my characters personality and role in the story. So I came across what I was looking for and implemented that in to my walk cycle animation. First, I animated the bow so at it follows the arms movement and the quiver and arrow, which were on his back you go up and down. Later on did I realize that I could put a locator from the bow to the arm, so it can follow the arms movement and it will look more believable as well as I imputed the bouncing of the body, so he can look like he is actually walking. The result you can see on the image below.