Age of Empires III Animation Clip

monster

Here is a segment of animation I did for the Age of Empires 3 interludes. It was about 3 crunch days of animation work. Since this is just a clip of the cinematic I'll explain what's going on.

John Black is trying to blow up the side of a mountain to create a blockade against the invading Russian army. Before he is done he is confronted by a small group of Russians.



Interlude 2 - WMV

Interlude 2 Story Reel - WMV

Interlude 2 Bipeds - AVI

In this segment I did all the character animation and rigging. The cinematic team was a small group of 7 artist with support from the Ensemble sound team.

CREDITS FOR THIS CLIP:
Character animation: monster
Environment: Zeus and DH
Warwick and Boneguard characters: the_Bird
John Black character: BoBo_the_seal
Compositing and rendering: Crow and the_Bird
FX and environment animation: Dion
Storyboards: Bart
Sound Composer: Mr. Rippy
Sound Performance: Seatle Symphony Orchestra

DH_

hey its cool to see this kind of stuff posted, its crazy how little time we had to do all 3, but I thought they turned out pretty good all things considered! Nice job on all the anims you did, you should post some of the stuff for the in game guys.

Spark

Very nice man, and I agree with DH that you should post more of the anims you did for Age 3. As they are also sweet.

poopinmymouth

Sweet man, but I like the knife version better, especially the spin at the end to get to the remote for the dynamite.

pogonip

That's awesome man I wish more animation was posted !

BoBo_the_seal

kick ass Juan! I want to see more! Not being there at the end of the project made me miss a lot of this type of stuff.
And thanks for showing the animatics too. I love seeing the process.

- BoBo

monster

Here is another clip of animations I did. This one was about 2 days of animation time with endless tweaking.




Interlude 3 - WMV

Interlude 3 Story Reel - WMV


I thought some of you may find this interesting. Here is a screen shot of my desktop while I'm working.

Desktop

Notice the keyframes for the characters are all on the same frames. This helps change timing and keeping the scene organized. If anyone has any questions on how we did anything feel free to ask.

killingpeople

in the final, it looks like he slides after being kicked off more than he should. doesn't do that in the "story reel" version.

jzero

Thanks for posting all that, Juan, very educational. If the keyframes for all the characters are on the same frames, how do you compensate if one character needs to start moving on a different frame from the others?

Oh, and whose idea was the oh-so-anachronistic plunger detonator?

/jzero

monster

killingpeople: Yeah the sliding was was added to put distance between him and the girl; to give her time to dive for a rifle and take a shot.

jzero: The detonator was in the storyboard and no one ever questioned it until it was too late. Also, if a character needs his own timing I at least make sure the character has full body poses.

Random keys on random body parts are so 1999. Pose to Pose is where it's at.

Moz

the animation is great but the voice acting is lacking. :S