Boogie Superstar Animation work by Lloyd J Colaco
One of my all time favorite character animation
i'll post it here to remind myself
the standard i'm aiming for
Lloyd said on CGTalk
The character concepts & designs had a cartoony feel to it and at the same time,
it also had some realism in the proportions...due to this reason,
the animations had to have the same feel (not too cartoony)
After research, we felt that the target audience (tween girls)
would rather see cartoony over realistic.
Fortunately, there was no Mo-Cap used for this game.
Everything was Key Animated.
Rigs
They were a lot of positive changes made in pre-production (regarding the rigs),
they were already looking pretty good.
So I was excited once the final rigs came in!
One of the coolest features it had was ‘bone translation’
we were able to translate the bones to our liking.
This helped a great deal for posing and squash & stretch.
References
Since I enjoy dancing and grew up watching music videos,
it was easy finding/choosing the refs I needed.
EA also hired professional dancers for refs.
Once I started the animation process.
I wasn’t too happy with my results,
though the refs were great...it was hard getting it look like an actual dance.
Since I knew what I wanted to do... I just decided to record myself as reference.
I found that really helpful in understanding movement.
I ended up doing most of the refs (for my animation) also got my Lead to do a couple
and managed to make my girlfriend to do the ‘girly moves’.
Luckily... the animation team had a great Lead, who was always open to ideas
and that definitely helped me animate freely (without too many restrictions).
Tempo
I used 15 frames as a beat,
so I would make sure a 2 beat move would start on 0 and end on 30.
it was also important to have key poses on these frames.
some dance moves would be harder considering it had to be a loop,
with a continuous smooth motion.
At the end, the audio was put in to match the animations
Awesome shit
So many nice arcs and fluid movements
I've hit all my to do list this week
yay
happy mother's day y'all
