[Portfolio] Sota Yuyama, Character Animator
Hello.
I have been animating in the Video Game Industry since 2001 but I have never shown my demo to the public before. I've just put together a simple website for my portfolio and l'd love to hear some of you're comments and critique.
www.sotayuyama.com
Also, if the site is down by any chance, here is my demo on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/1354263
Thanks!
I have been animating in the Video Game Industry since 2001 but I have never shown my demo to the public before. I've just put together a simple website for my portfolio and l'd love to hear some of you're comments and critique.
www.sotayuyama.com
Also, if the site is down by any chance, here is my demo on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/1354263
Thanks!
Replies
How did you even do that breakdancing scene? You must have had an amazing rig, or were fighting against it the entire way for a lot of those moves.
aesir
-I animated that scene in 3dsmax and used Biped rig from Character studio. Biped rig in Charactor studio is limited for customization but basic IK/FK control is seamless and very powerful. I would say that made huge difference in animating this breakdance sequence. Otherwise, I basically animated in different segments of moves and made sure they were strong. Then I put them together with by animating transitions and tweaked the hell out of it just like any other animators. : )
Just everything moves to smoothly and you give the models so much life. Awesome job, mate. Post more stuff when you get the chance.
-caseyjones
cool, thanks for explaining. I used to use biped quite a lot, and I can see how it could work really well for that type of animation, especially with the newest update where feet and hands can be used the same way. Its interesting that you made seperate clips and created transitions for them. Ive never worked that way before.
-Thanks for another nice comment! Another fuel poured into my animation engine! : )
Yes, on Bully, everything got toned down for final game which was unfortunate. Original characters were so awesome. They had so much more personality and models were translated so well from the concept art. They really helped to get my creativity going and made my animation to look stronger. (btw, all the textured Bully characters in my demo were modeled by TWilson in this forum and he did an awesome job!) In my opinion, having strong design and character model makes huge difference for animations and I was really lucky for that project.
aesir
-Those breakdance animations were from one of the game prototyping project, so they had to be done individually in order to map them on different buttons and stuff. I basically put them all together for my demo purpose. Having the individual moves really made managing scene easy at the end of the day. I was able to shuffle them around to find the animation flow that I like.
Keep up the great work!
And yes, Lipsync is the weakest part of my skill set. I'm hoping to have more experience and improve on that part especially, since I just started to do freelancing.
: )
Woot, anudda VFS grad
Welcome to Polycount.
All the animations looked very solid and seemed to have a good sense of weight. I have to agree with some of the other people, your lip syncs are definately not as strong. I think the problem might be that the acting seems forced rather than natural. I suggest looking at some really proffesional animation acting and get a sense of how they do it. Or more importantly, just do some overall people watching. But good job!
-Thanks!
TWilson
-Thanks for your comment and also inviting me to Polycount!!
Mezz
-Thanks for your comment and suggestion! Acting is definitely something I'd like to focus and improve since I hardly have the experiences. I think I'll join my 3 years old daughter for watching pixar movies more often.
Also, just to get started, I'm planning on participating 11 seconds club soon.
Yes, I did. I watched tons of Breakdance video(Redbull BC One was the one I watched the most). I also took few breakdance classes among with teenagers.... hahaha. I was so sore for a while but it definitely helped.
-Thank you!
Did you use a control board/morphs for the facial animations, or bones? I'm surprised you didn't use Motion Builder at all for some of the fight scenes, nice work.
Oh man you really need to check out Motion Mixer and if you haven't already, also check out biped layers. It's really quick to load in a standing still walk cycle (saved from any biped), and then add a position layer and move the COM where you need to go while looping/scaling the walk cycle in Motion Mixer, need it to break into a trot then jump? No prob, (ok its a bit of work but less then doing it all by hand).
PuppetShop has pretty much the same workflow but a little simpler.
-Thanks for your comment! I used "blend shape" in Maya for a facial stuff. I didn't use motion builder for my demo. Most of the stuffs were done in 3dsMax Charactor studio and some in Maya. Btw, how is Motion Builder for hand keying stuff? I've only used it for Mocap. It was good package for tweaking mocap for sure.
For breakdance scene, Motion Mixer definitely came in really handy. It gave me a lots of control when it came to playing with timings. Overall, I think 3dsMax Character Studio is bit underrated in general. I think it's really powerful animation package when it comes to animating biped and using it for video game development.
I had a chance to use PuppetShop briefly and yeah, it was also an another cool package. My friend had a chance to use it and she said it's great especially for rigging/animating creatures.
carlo_c
-Thanks for your comment. Another fuel poured into my animation engine!
Motion Builder is great, especially for fight scenes between two characters.
Being able to link one bone in one rig, to another in a different character and have it drive the animation is great. Its fast and easy to set up, right in the main interface not buried in a sub-menu.
Another really great thing about Motion Builder (crap I sound like an autodesk rep) is that it imports/exports to and from Maya and Max easily using the FBX file format.
It doesn't really matter what a studio chooses to use Max or Maya as long as they have a copy of Motion Builder for their animator(s). Since it bridges the app gap it would allow you to apply at just about any studio, provided they're serious about giving animators quality tools.
It has motion mixer like qualities with regards to clips but you can also hand key animation on new layers. So for example you have a mo-cap clip (thats keyed on every frame and impossible to work with) of someone spin kicking, you can hand key the position to have him spin kick off a box connect with someones face, use the foot drive the head on the kicked character all the while adjusting the animation in the first character to account for the collision and extra motion. Which is doable in Motion Mixer, but might take longer and quite a few more clicks.
You'll do great things with any app I'm sure but I would strongly urge you to look into Motion Builder more especially if you like doing fight scenes. The industry is always in need of good choreography so it never hurts to have those great clips in your reel.
If you haven't already checked out some of the stuff from High Moon. They recently wrapped up a Jason Borne game that has amazing fight scenes. The env art is great too, so is the concept art. But it falls down in a few areas, not really enjoyable outside of marveling at the fight scenes.
Blend shapes huh, so you read Stop Starring? Awesome book. If you're interested in rigging up morphs in 3dsmax to a control board I have some tips and scripts. This post is running really long so I'll cut it short...
Awesome reel, you'll make a great addition to whatever team you work on next!
Thanks for all the info! Motion Builder sounds like an awesome tool for keyframing, too! I should take my time to learn about it more for sure.
Ya, since I'm big fan of Martial Arts/Fight Sports/Wrestling(although not as much as I used to), doing fight scene choreography sounds like a fun project to do! Maybe that'll be my next project.
Vampyre_Dark
Thank you! I really enjoyed working on that Powerbomb! I actually have an experience being powerbombed by my friend into a mat in past and it probably helped to do this animation as well.
veteehrri
Thank you for your nice comment!