Research

Primary Research

Here are the thumbnail sketches of each animation sequence that will go in the cinematic.

This one is mine, the idle was firstly supposed to be looking around however I felt a breathing idle would suit the animation better, then my character begins to run in the second motion, then jumping over an obstacle and finally killing a wounded enemy. 

Here is the animation Mateusz will be creating, the wounded character I just killed, he begins with the idle, deep breathing on the floor, then crawling, then calling for help using one of his hand and finally his last breath. 

Finally here are Rauno's and Tom's animation sequences, Rauno begins with his combat stance idle pose, then dodges and attack, then using his shield to block and attack the opponent  and finally killing them while on the floor. Tom's animation begins with the character on upper ground, then running and jumping off and finally landing with a combat stance focusing on my character, the camera will zoom on his facial expression. 

The idea behind the idle animation is that I want the character to act Arrogant, and very confident on the battlefield. So I was thinking the character would have steady breathing before  running towards the enemy and I think this idle does prepare the character to do that.

The line of action demonstrated on my character's idle pose

Here are some silhouette poses of my idle animation, I feel this shows I am in a battlefield and ready for my next attack, my character is breathing slightly faster which in my animation which tells you he has is slightly out of breath. 

The difference between breathing in and out is minimal, I wanted to keep it realistic and not over-do it, you can see with the spine, it goes straighter as the character breaths in. Also the legs stand up straighter.

I am now looking at the running cycle, I remember created a walk cycle last year, I think this will prove to be more difficult but after some research on it I feel I can use the resources to aid me without any problems. 

I also created a sequence of silhouettes showing the key poses in my run motion.

Secondary Research 

I looked at Idle animations in games, some cartoon and some more life like to see how they are different and gather some ideas of different motions. I think the realistic ones are most relevant to me and I like the breathing one so I went with that idea.

Here is an example of a character's animation run cycle, similar to the walk cycle I did last year however a little more difficult to get the timings right since running is a lot faster than walking, I looked at a few different walk cycles and sketched my own as you can see in my primary research. The drive off ans stride poses are the most important I think, and can give your character a bit of personality if done correctly. 

I also looked at some video's on YouTube to help me see other peoples animation work as well as real life run cycles.

Here is a video of someone on a treadmill with slow motion you can see the movements of the arms and legs and this really helped me with my work.

http://vimeo.com/album/531707/video/7785572

Here are some examples of a character running and jumping over an obstacle, this is the third animation in my sequence and one of the most difficult to create I think, this was one of the animation I really wanted to put in my sequence and based it off this. 

After some research using YouTube and seeing how other people have done it I have broken it down into key poses. 

Again I found this in a game cinematic and thought I'd add it on here.

 Here are some silhouette poses of my jump animation, I did this so I can see how well my poses look just seeing the outline of my character 

And here are some silhouette poses of my stabbing animation, I think I did well with pulling the sword back then stabbing it in him with the natural hand movements.