Major Project: First Fight Sequence Animated + Weapon Trails

 Today I began animating the first part of the fight between the two characters. I purposely haven't animated both characters in the same scene up until this point as I wanted to get the hang of working with the rigs. 

I tried animating the shot before the main action in which the Cyberpunk character swings his sword towards the Samurai, however the movements did not look fluid and it felt like something was missing. This made me nervous to animate the rest of the fight sequence as I did not want the fight to look unnatural. This left me feeling stumped as to what I could do to improve the shot. I referred back to my drawings to see what it was which made the animatic look more interesting. I found that it was more visually interesting due to the anime like action lines which followed the sword as it swung. I therefore researched to see if this was an achievable effect to recreate in Maya.

I managed to find a video which used MASH to leave trails after showing text on the screen. I followed along the same workflow however applied to to the Cyberpunk characters katana. This created a really cool effect every time the character moved the sword around. There are also loads of tweaks which could be made in the settings in order to further utilize this effect. By finding this tool it has opened up the possibility of so many additional visual imagery I could add to the animation which I thought I would have to work out how to do in post. For example the characters could leave behind trail marks when they run or the Cyberpunk characters eye could leave behind a trail of light as it runs. I will keep in mind all of these ideas once the first pass of the animation has been completed. 

I then decided to move on to the first part of the fight scene. This part of the fight scene is probably the most significant as the two characters are meeting for the fist time as well as being the most animated the two characters get throughout the animation. For this reason I found it hard to convey the movements at first. In order to help with this, I referred all the way back to the animatic and recreated each of the significant shots frame by frame. This way I had a basis to develop from. 

My main problem starting out this shot was that I was trying to make the poses look good on camera, rather than actually having the character do the correct action. For example on camera it would look as if the Cyberpunk character was pointing his katana directly at the Samurai, when in the actual Maya scene this was not the case and it was simply perspective. This meant that going forward to the next frame would have the characters drastically changing poses, to the point that their arms may flip the wrong way of even go through each other. For this reason I spent a long time on this shot in order to pose the characters in the way they would appear in real life. 

Overall I am really happy with how the shot turned out. It may seem slightly framy however it replicates the anime style I was going for. I want to add in effects when editing to fill in some of the gaps. I also did it this way to ensure that it is easier to follow. There are also some additional movements I want to add in between the character on the second pass. 

I also remodelled the environment around the characters as I felt the other one was ugly. The old version had a lot going on for no real reason and was higher poly. I think this more subtle background is better as it keeps the focus on the action. I used the foam brush to create the mountains and then went over them with the sculpt tool to make the edges look sharper and more stylised.