Game Animation Reel

[ArchangelTalon]

Hey mate, really nice work.


The Nuclear Dawn stuff looks great, especially the black-armored guy crouching then getting up and shooting, good weight and natural movement to him.


My only crit would be on your rogue leaping that huge gap to a lower level. The roll at the end looks a little too casual and weightless to be real. As flawless as his action is, I think you'd find he'd hit the ground a lot harder and roll upright considerably faster. And this is talking from experience of doing dive rolls from a just standing start, let alone a height.

If you want to be really accurate, ideally you'd land on the back of (either) shoulder with your head tucked in as far as it'll go and then roll down one side of your back, rather than the centre (this prevents the spine being damaged on hard surfaces) and up onto your feet.

But yeah, that was the only bit that irked me, and it was a small irk.


Very nicely presented overall. Good music choice, too ;)


As a suggestion, what'd be nice is a moving grid on the podiums of the people walking/running, passing at the same speed and direction they're moving in (much like you can see in HLMV). I find it gives me a much better idea of whether the speed/gait/etc looks correct. Also helps to make it look like they're not moonwalking, too, I guess...

[johnwoo]

Wow!!....I totally dig ya reel man!!...I was pretty much impressed by ya work, the motion (especially the opening anim) is very well done and looks convincing in motion, actually it's 1 thing I don't see a lot of actually...jogging anims, I see loads of walks and sprinting...but hardly any jogging anims...good call....also the other high point of ya reel was the soldier behind cover and the 1st person firing/reloading anims...quite detailed and specific motion...:thumbsup: from me...good work soldier!!...

[SnowFella]

Really nice work mate!

Can't say I know anything about animation but a few small things are naggin me, mainly bout the black clad guy doing is crouch/fire/crouch.
First of all the barrel seems to intersect the wall as he gets up. Not majorly but it does look alittle odd for a reel.
Secondly he really ought to be leaning into it alittle more to counteract the recoil. I did quite a bit of fullauto firing during my time in the army and unless you lean into it you very liable to turn into an AA gun :rolleyes:

[Nurbguy]

nice reel, dont think u'll have much trouble finding a job out there. Just curious but did u go to Teesside uni by any chance?

[SHEPEIRO]

very nice reel, only noticed gun, intersection because i read the post, shouldnt be too much of a prob, the only crit i have about the anim, is that the dive into water at the end, is tooo smooth, there should be a little effect on the legs as the body enters the water and slows down, also there needs to be more speed change, just to add a little more nature.

good luck with the job, impressive reel.

[Headless]

Cheers for all te comments guys.

Talon: Hey buddy, you're right about the landing. A couple of other people have mentioned that to me so i'm looking at changing it. I did use reference from Urban Freeflow (http://www.urbanfreeflow.com/), but obviously didn't match it up quite as well as I could have, so i'll put some more work into that.

johnwoo: Thanks for the compliments man. :)

Snowfella: I was all ready to come on here and say that I was sure it didn't intersect, but I just went back and checked it and you're right. It's funny really cause alot of people have seen this and no-one has ever mentioned it, so nice spot.

Nurbguy: Yeah, I went to Teesside. How'd you know?

Shepeiro: I had kind of a tough time trying to display the dive. He does actually slow down correctly when he enters the water, and if you watch it in a wide shot you see that, but the problem was that if i went with a close up shot you didn't have any points of reference to see how fast he was going through the water and if you went with a wide shot you were so far away you couldn't see the animation. I tried adding little buoys to the water to act as reference points, I tried doing camera fly-by's but nothing really worked, so I kind of left it like this.

I'll take a look at more imperfections in the limb movement though as I think you're probably right on that.

Cheers.

[Nurbguy]

cos a mate of mine rich knows a Dan lowe and i just wondered if u were him, and obviously u are lol!

[Headless]

Rich Bannister?

[Nurbguy]

yeah thats the one

[the alsoran]

Nice work. It's rare to see a showreel so well tailored for videogame animation. The alsoran's only major crits are:

The run towards the end: The character's centre of gravity is too far back, causing him to look as if he is decelerating just before stopping. This can be rectified by ensuring the feet do not extend too far in front of the pelvis. The jog at the start is a better example of correct weight distribution.


Overall, every animation is slower and more subtle than is required for videogame animation. As the camera is further away from characters, larger more exaggerated actions are required to sell movement.


Similarly, gameplay actions such as the character firing and the weapon reload would adversely affect the game flow at this speed. These are two things that do not greatly affect the reel, and you will overcome when you gain employment, which should be soon given the strength of this reel.
Good luck.

[Headless]

I'm going back over some of the animations and making tweaks. One of the things I did notice is that i'd animated a lot of the clips at 30fps and yet the Premiere sequence is running at 25fps, which might account for why some of the animations seem too slow or lack purpose.

I'll post an update in a day or two when hopefully alot of stuff will look a bit better.

[PhilOsirus]

For some reason Quicktime keeps giving me an error message saying it is not a file Quicktime can read:/

[Headless]

I'm uploading an updated version of the reel at the moment. I did note it in my first post.

[EDIT] Ok, finished uploading now. Here's the updated video. I edited the links in the first post so they point to these files too.

High Quality (768x576) [ .mov 27.5mb ] (recommended)
Quicktime Movie (http://danlowe.nuclear-dawn.net/danlowereel.mov) (right click -> save as)

Medium Quality (480x360) [ .mov 15.9mb ]
Quicktime Movie (http://danlowe.nuclear-dawn.net/danlowereel_small.mov) (right click -> save as)

Things i've changed in this version...

* Re-edited the reel so that everything is now running at the correct 30fps that it was animated at.
* Tweaked the 'walk with pistol' animation to get rid of a slight skip at the loop point.
* Tweaked the 'get up - shoot - cover' animation to stop the rifle clipping through the wall when the guy gets up.
* Changed the resolution to a correct 4:3 aspect ratio.
* Edited the sound to match the new reel length

I'm gonna start on more serious animation changes now. Just thought I should get the correct framerate sorted out asap.

Cheers.

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