Heroes of the Storm - Valeera Support Animations

TheBrokenTangent

Here's some recent animations I did for Heroes of the Storm.  Valeera support animations for mounts, flails, and a stun.

https://vimeo.com/202156861

I also worked on a little write up on my website on my process to create a video game "flail" animation that you can check out below.  Please leave me any feedback on the write-up.  I'm new to attempting to write out my animation process so if things are unclear drop me a line so I can improve for my next one.

https://www.thebrokentangent.com/news/2017/1/31/post-1-daggers-and-ponytails

Enjoy and thanks for reading!  

Hito

awesome! I definitely see the stuns in game. though I usually see Valeera dishing it out with her stealth stun. There's no sideways "flail"? The game turns the character to the closest direction fwd/backward?

slipsius

Some good stuff here! Though, not a fan of the black background for the renders. 

TheBrokenTangent

Hito said:

awesome! I definitely see the stuns in game. though I usually see Valeera dishing it out with her stealth stun. There's no sideways "flail"? The game turns the character to the closest direction fwd/backward?

Thank you!  I'm not sure about the logistics of how the game figures out what flail to use, sorry.  But we do not animate any side flails.  Just backwards, forwards, and straight up in the air.

slipsius said:

Some good stuff here! Though, not a fan of the black background for the renders. 

Thank you!  Appreciate the honesty!  What would you prefer?  A light or dark gray?  

Hito

Do the animators have access to the engine tools of HoTS? to what degree? the tech artists seems to be split on giving access (and how much access) of engine tools to the artists, looking at a later segment of AnimX with a group of tech artists, Brett Pascal being an exception.

slipsius

TheBrokenTangent said:

Hito said:

awesome! I definitely see the stuns in game. though I usually see Valeera dishing it out with her stealth stun. There's no sideways "flail"? The game turns the character to the closest direction fwd/backward?

Thank you!  I'm not sure about the logistics of how the game figures out what flail to use, sorry.  But we do not animate any side flails.  Just backwards, forwards, and straight up in the air.

slipsius said:

Some good stuff here! Though, not a fan of the black background for the renders. 

Thank you!  Appreciate the honesty!  What would you prefer?  A light or dark gray?  

Ya, definitely a mid-dark grey. Something that lets you see the silhouette a bit more.

TheBrokenTangent

Hito said:

Do the animators have access to the engine tools of HoTS? to what degree? the tech artists seems to be split on giving access (and how much access) of engine tools to the artists, looking at a later segment of AnimX with a group of tech artists, Brett Pascal being an exception.

 We have access to certain tools, yes. Mainly just the SC2 editor and tools that allow us to export from MAX directly to our local game build. I can see why they're split on giving us too much access. At some point we should be focusing on the art and they should be focusing on the tools but a little cross pollination never hurts. 

slipsius

Not sure why having access is a bad thing. Do you guys not have to set up your own animations in engine? Do you hand them off to the tech animators? 

TheBrokenTangent

slipsius said:

Not sure why having access is a bad thing. Do you guys not have to set up your own animations in engine? Do you hand them off to the tech animators? 

We set up all of our animations in MAX. We house every single one of our animations in one file per Hero where the tech artists have set up an "animation window" where we can plug in animation info as we create them.

slipsius

MAX as in... 3ds max? wow... Did not expect you guys to be using that. 

That sounds great though. Being able to set everything up in the animation file itself. Damn. Does that mean that each animator owns a hero, since they are all in 1 file? Or do you work locally and then merge into 1 file later?

TheBrokenTangent

slipsius said:

MAX as in... 3ds max? wow... Did not expect you guys to be using that. 

That sounds great though. Being able to set everything up in the animation file itself. Damn. Does that mean that each animator owns a hero, since they are all in 1 file? Or do you work locally and then merge into 1 file later?

Yeah and crazy enough we're not the only team that uses it. I was working with Maya for seven years before I moved over to the Heroes team. It took me weeks to figure out what the heck I was doing lol  

We typically have one lead animator and one or two that will support. The lead will typically work in the master file and the support animators will create working folders locally and work from that. In the end we save out the animations and bring them back into our master file to export into the game.

Hito

everything in max, man... so luxurious!