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.

Trion Figure Drawing May 2012

It's been forever since I last posted anything on this site. So here's my first offering for 2012.

We basically did a figure drawing workshop every week for the month of May. Finding an art model isn't easy, so we're fortunately these ladies were all available this month.

Diamond

(5-10 minute poses)

Juliet

(5-10 minute pose)

Lauren

(5-10 minute pose)

Latest Trion Figure Drawings

Here are some sketches from Trion's latest figure drawing workshops. Our model for July was Devon Jones, a sexy roller derby performer. The August model was Anastacia Armstrong, fashion designer and artist.

Devon Jones

2 -5 minute poses

Anastacia Armstrong

5 - 10 minute poses

Finding good models is really difficult, so I count myself very fortunate to be able to work with these wonderful ladies.

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.

Trion Figure Drawing - April 2011

2 - 5 minute poses

I've just gotten around to posting this. It was from our April session at Trion, modeling of course is my friend Katherine Burness. For this one, I decided to exaggerate her postures a bit.

Trion Figure Drawing - July 6, 2011

I'm pleased to be putting up some new drawings this month (finally). For this 2 hour session our model was Brooke Milos.

2 minute poses.

5 minute poses.

10 minute pose.

I have taken over organizing our studio's bi-weekly figure drawing sessions. It was a bit nerve wracking at first, since I had no experience organizing any kind of event and have never hired art models before.

It's literally been months and months since I last posted anything. With the release of our game and a bunch of other stuff I got going on outside of work, I just got too overwhelmed with all these things happening at once. I guess I'm not as adept at multi-tasking as I thought. But all in all, this has been a great learning experience.


^_^

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.