Zwiebel's animation corner

[Zwiebelchen]

With all the talented modelling artists here having their own little showcase threads, I thought it couldn't hurt making my own, since I am big into modelling and animating these days.


I will keep updating this with new animations I create for you guys to throw critique at and stuff.


All models and animations are created almost entirely in MDLVis. I do have Neodex and 3dsmax, but I found using MDLvis directly more reliable, despite the missing comfort functions.

Enjoy!





My first project is a new character model for Gaias Retaliation. As the game didn't come with good animations that suit a cunning melee fighting style that can switch between sword and lance attacks, I scrapped everything and started completely fresh in MDLVis.


Here are some animation highlights of my new model:


As all GR heroes, this one also uses a replacable texture for different armor skins and has teamcolored hair:



The black weapon attached to the right hand is just a placeholder. This model will use attachment models, so I added a black geoset there for reference.




I started with a basic walk cycle:




Switching the stance will exchange the weapon to a lance type weapon, which will use a complete alternate animation set. Here's one of the rarer stand animations for the lance weapon:




Also, both stand ready animations for sword and lance style:




Attack animations for the sword stance:




Attack animations for the Lance stance so far:




Spell animations:




The model has all required portrait animations included, but to give it more life, I added realistic looking eyelids with actual eyelashes to the portrait animations:






That's all for now. I will add new pictures once I finish the remaining attack and spell animations. Cheers!

 

[HappyCockroach]

Good animating

The walk cycle is correct. I'd only put a little bit more torso movement after the the steps impact, and maybe make it a little less jumpy.
In the attack anim, the right leg could hold its position (move the root to the right when she attacks). That right foot flipping to the left doesn't look too natural...

But great job so far. The model itself looks great. Did you do those textures?

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Good animating

The walk cycle is correct. I'd only put a little bit more torso movement after the the steps impact, and maybe make it a little less jumpy.

Making a good looking walk cycle is tough shit. The jumpy movement is a compromise I made to make the model look better from birdseye perspective. Before I added that, the walk animation lacked impact and didn't blend well with regular WC3 models. I adjusted it like this to bring it more in line with the blizzard art style.
The torso movement is a good point. Ill see what I can do about it here. The problem is that I attach a cape model to most of my heroes, which tends to look bad on walk cycles with extensive torso rotating. Let's see how far I can push it.

In the attack anim, the right leg could hold its position (move the root to the right when she attacks). That right foot flipping to the left doesn't look too natural...

Hehe, this got "lost in translation", so to speak.
The model actually raises her right foot above the ground instead of flipping it so that it looks like she is actually moving her leg. When I made the gif, some important keyframes got skipped, which makes it look like its just flipping when in reality it is being pulled smoothly.
I originally had the right leg fixed on its initial position, but realized it looked terrible to keep it that way, as the model would then leave its center of mass way too far when attacking.

But great job so far. The model itself looks great. Did you do those textures?

The face texture is a (modified) vanilla WoW texture. The head model (albeit with some heavy adjustments to make the eyes look human) is a modified blood elf head from WoW. Other than that, the model and textures are made from scratch. I didn't do the textures on my own as I'm terrible with textures. Fellow forum member Daenar7 did these for me as a commission job.

I have ~30 different armor skins for all my models from him. I'm currently thinking about releasing all Gaias Retaliation hero models as a package here on hive (not the skins though, as I paid money for those and they are technically not my property, but that of Daenar7), so that people can make and upload new armor skins I can profit from.

 

[Stefan.K]

This is actually interesting. Especially to us who make models but don't know how to animate.
It would be pretty nice if we could get some tip of how you animate. I'm surprised you animated in Mdlvis, when I started animating in the same program my models crashed several times. When attaching vertices to the bones crashed my models aswell..

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Added a new attack animation to my initial post.


And yes, the MDLvis crashes can be annoying at times, but after a time you understand what it is that crashes the editor, so you can easily avoid those situations.
For example, using "reattach vertices to bone" is less vulnerable to crashes than the normal way of adding vertices.


EDIT: And another attack animation added. Finished all sword attack animations now; next goal is making 2 lance attack animations. These will be a bit easier to make, as making forward movements doesn't require as much pelvis movement, which reduces the number of correctional keyframes on the feet.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Finished all the animations now. Ready for some cold-ass critique here.

 

[Cuore]

Goodness gracious :O I'm amazed by this. +rep

 

[Kyrbi0]

Daaaaang... That looks really quite good. I'm not sure how well it would fit in Warcraft, but then again this is for your special mod, so it's probably perfect.

And you did all this in MdlVis? Daaang, I need to take some lessons.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

It fits surprisingly well if you compare it to regular hero models like Sylvanas. The only thing that really sticks out is the detail on the face in the portrait animations. Depending on which Blizz models you compare it with, it might or might not blend in well - Because even WC3 models weren't created equally by Blizzard.