Animating a Two Handed Sword Attack - The Vertical Slash

I thought I'd do a little write-up of the process of animating something as simple as a sword attack. First off, I'm proud to say all the animation work we did on Rift are all  keyframe and it's been a while since I got to do animation like this, straight up. The image below shows the breakdown of each key pose.

Two Handed Sword Vertical Attack

Key Poses

As you can see from the key poses above, the basic principles of animation still applies. However, it's up to you (the animator) to find a creative way of applying the principles or to break the rules as you see fit to produce the effect you want out of your animation.

So what's my process for animating something like this? Well, I usually start by drawing a series of thumbnails and doodles on paper before I even begin any work in front of the computer. This is the planning stage, where I work out different ideas on poses and how I think my character will be moving. Since this particular animation is about combat, of course I also look at video references (thanks YouTube) on the subject of weaponry and body mechanics - and it's all about body mechanics. Then I begin a bunch of pose tests (key poses) and see how the movement will "flow." The rest is simply tweaking until the animation feels right (and test and make sure it works in game... very important).

Here's The Actual Animation

As It Appears In The Game

In the fantasy world of RIFT, the Bahmi are a race of large, hulking humanoids from the Plane of Air who arrived during a time of war and became stranded when the portal to their realm closed, trapping them on Telara forever. They average around 7 feet tall, with the smallest male Bahmi being like the size of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson... yup.

My Bahmi animation

Here's my male Bahmi mage animation being featured on Rift's mage class trailer.

Bahmi Mage animation from Ferd on Vimeo.

Though... I dunno why the people who put this together have him using his arcane powers on a poor helpless fluffy bunny.

Rift goes live for headstart 02.24.2011

RIFT has gone live this thursday! Everyone who preordered the game can now log in and play online! It's a historic day for Trion Worlds, with the release of our first flagship title and already the number of players playing our game is through the roof!

Here's a clip of my Bahmi celebrating our release. ^_^

Rift will be out in stored March 1st, and in Europe March 4th.

Bahmi Tattoo Concepts/Game Screens

With the lifting of the NDA weeks ago and permission from Trion Worlds, I thought I'd do a little write up on some tattoo designs I recently did for the Bahmi charcters in "Rift."

The Bahmi is one of the playable races in Rift. Aligned with the Defiant faction, they are descended from the half-giant Shalastiri from the plane of Air, whose bodies and especially their faces are adorned with very distinct magical tattoos called sefir.

I've been primarily animating the male Bahmi, but this would be the first time I've contributed some concept art for it... and actually got it in the game (woo!!). Fortunately, one of the character artists working on refining the textures and model of the Bahmi shared my ideas on the character as far as (tattoo) designs were concerned - so after a few discussions I presented him with these sefir concepts;

 

Bahmi facial "sefir"

(tattoo) designs

Time was short (shocker). I submitted the designs and out of these they were able to create multiple variations of the base patterns, quickly doubling the number of choices for character creation. I'm quite happy with the results, considering the constraints we had;

Male Bahmi "sefir" patterns

applied to game model

Side to side comparison

of the female Bahmi "sefir" in-game

with the sketch

I was only able to design two patterns for the female version... pretty much ran out of time, but it still made it into the game.

The other races in the game also have tattoo options, but I designed the sefir patterns with the Bahmi specifically in mind. Hopefully, the patterns remain unique to this race.

Big thanks to the character artist Shawn Shain and our art director Darren Pattenden for letting me contribute these defining characteristics for the Bahmi race.

Rift will be available for the PC on March 1st, 2011.

Rift: Planes Of Telara

(The playable Bahmi warrior that I'm currently animating for the game)

Trion Worlds has finally unveiled our flagship mmo title to the public, "Rift: Planes Of Telara." Formerly titled "Heroes Of Telara," it's been getting a lot of great press these past few days. We still got plenty of work to do to make it look and play awesome (even though many people already think so). In the meantime, here are some links announcing the game.

Game site - http://www.riftgame.com/en/index.php

massively.com - http://www.massively.com/2010/04/26/massivelys-hands-on-look-at-rift-planes-of-telara/

MMORPG - http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/431/feature/4191/Trion-Worlds-Event-Rift-Planes-of-Telara-Preview.html

Ten Ton Hammer - http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift/first_look

It's been an exciting week!

Heroes Of Telara

Finally announced at this year's E3 is Heroes Of Telara, the upcoming MMO that I've been animating on. Currently being developed and to be published by Trion World Network Inc.

There's quite a lot of haters out there since our game was unveiled, mainly 'cause the majority who have seen our first trailer don't really understand that this game isn't and does not intend to be like World Of Warcraft.

Heroes Of Telara does offer highly social and dynamic online gaming that is different than the usual mmorpg experience - not many understand what the hell that means or how the gameplay works, resulting in some pretty harsh first impression reviews. However, this reviewer seems to understand better than most of the press that showed up at our private demo - http://vgtribune.com/100-million-question-is-heroes-of-telara-the-world-of-warcraft-killer/ (this guy does exaggerate a bit - our goal is not to be a WoW killer, but rather to put out good game that is drastically different from your usual run-of-the-mill MMO game, which hopefully players will enjoy immensely).

This is the first trailer, so nothing is really polished as of yet.