Week 5: Animation Considerations

For our initial animation considerations and pose studies, we chose our most intimidating antagonist, Shanzhu the jiangshi, as our subject. The main reason for this being is that he is the focal point of our boss battle, and getting his intimidating presence and movements down is going to be crucial to maintaining tension in that selfsame battle.

As stated below, we've looked into several Disney villains, such as Ratcliffe from Pocahontas and Sykes from Oliver & Company, not only for general body type but also the way that they move. In our poses, we wanted to nail the ease and confidence that Shanzhu has in himself and how that can intimidate and overpower the player.

In these poses, we wanted to show Shanzhu's size and stature and how that relates to his overall demeanor: he is very commanding and has a leonine sort of ease and confidence to his movements (despite his massive size). Maintaining his cool is very important to him, except it doesn't always work...

When the player manages to strike him, he loses that composure. The boss battle revolves around attacking his talismans, and Shanzhu has a personal fear of people seeing his face. When struck, he instinctually acts to hide his face from the player.

A main phase of the boss battle is where Shanzhu reaches out to the player to grab them. We wanted to show that and also how intimidating it could be in action.

(Poses were courtesy of Alex Papanicolaou, KC Brady, and Claire Rice, while Summan Mirza provided the rig.)

As mentioned, we started researching videos to provide some inspiration and goal for how each character will move. Because the game is heavily stylized with our Sam Nielson artist inspiration, we tried to stay within the general realm of Disney. It's not to say all of them are, of course, but it was the first place we went when considering.

For Shanzhu, we looked at Ratcliffe from Pocahontas and Sykes from Oliver & Company.

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We also started to consider inspirations for other characters, such as...

Pitch Black from Rise of the Guardians for the demeanor/movement of the rogue channeler. Though Pitch is much more talkative and charismatic than the enigmatic type of personality we're going for the rogue channeler, the overall ethereal manner of his movements and the way he disappears into shadows is important to emulate.

Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet for Chao. We especially liked the rounded manner of his movements and how everyday and commonplace they make him seem.

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And the movements of the mermaids from The Little Mermaid for Shahzaad, which is very important because of his levitation and the movements of his tail.

We also did more research into blend shapes for our facial animation. Here is a blend shapes facial animation set which we are going to perhaps be using as reference for different expressions to blend to. The goal is to make a low-res base mesh which we can use to make these and then blend towards, so it doesn't end up being too taxing.