[Riot Creative Contest 2017] - Maikoe Alaniz

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  hiddencat polycounter lvl 3

  Jan 2018

  
  Alright, I got a little time to do this thread so I'll post my process and little things I thought when jumping from version to version. It's a shame I didn't have time to share it here before so I could get the great feedback everyone else got but I sadly heard about the contest about three days ago and my workload at the moment is gigantic. I didn't want to not participate but at the same time I knew my time was extremely limited.
  
  With those things in mind I set out to do a really simple movement cycle and an ultimate animation that could look flashy but stay on the simpler side of things.
  
  Let's start with the ultimate animation:
  
  Blocking 1
  I just sat down and brainstormed what a snowboarder champion would look like. I enjoy LoL's freljord theme and I connected it for some reason to a character from an old manga called Shaman King. In that manga the character (Horo Horo) sometimes used his board as a fist so I thought it would be a cool thing to imagine in motion/3D.
  
  Just basic poses, trying to get the ideas out of my head into the software.
  
  
  
  
  Blocking 2
  
  Getting more poses out, and defining the idea a little bit. I tried to mantain gameplay in mind at all times so I wanted the animation to be funcional and not too convoluted; I wanted her to travel forward for the entire main body of the animation and only travel backwards when she dealt the damage. In my mind her ultimate her ultimate had to be functional in the sense that no melee character could realistically stay locked for more than 2 seconds (hence the full duration of the piece; 60 frames) without it being extremely sub-optimal or having a heavy amount of crowd-control, so I also gave her terrain generation, because in my mind that would help her not be so susceptible to other melee champions while winding up. (Ice has collisions)
  
  My goals moving forward were giving her more strength in the peak of the jump and making everything snappier. I'm pretty sure this version was over 60 frames and I did not want that.
  
  
  Spline 1
  
  One of my goals here was to make the timing adjust to my self-imposed limit of 60 frames and also start to shift the animation towards a more "Riot" style; Implement some subtle smears and make the rhythm of the piece be something that could sound cooler with SFX. 
  
  
  Spline 2
  
  Some curve work, spacing work and clarity on some poses. Extra rhythm work as well, in my mind the punch had to "sound" really cool.
  
  
  Final Pass
  
  Sadly it was time to pack it up and call it a final version since I ran out of time. All in all it was really fun to think like I was designing a champion's moveset. I wish I had more time to revisit some ideas or add new flashy things but sadly I came to know about the contest WAY too late for me to not move forward all the time. I couldn't really back out of any idea or pass, as scrapping work would have meant to not meet the deadline.
  
  
  
  For the walking animation I decided to go with something simple that would highlight the magical powers of the character. I debated making her "surf" with a really heavy forward body lean but I didn't want to go the Taliyah route, because I feel like that animation makes that champion really special. In the end I decided for a sideways floating sort of animation for normal movement speed. I wanted to make a second video having the walk cycle transition into a high movement speed animation but I didn't know if it was allowed since the rules only specify one video for the first category and my time only really allowed for me to do something extremely simple after having burned most of my time budget in the Ultimate. There's not really much to explain as for thought process so I'll just leave the gifs for the final pass. The goal for it was to not make it too flashy as it would get annoying in game-play and to set her up frontally for different spell animations and to have a clearer character facing direction for things like Cassiopeia ultimate and such.
  
  
  
  Because of my time constraint this was really more of a an exercise for me to adjust to something like a game-play style of animation (I normally do film/TV) with a tight deadline. I enjoyed it a lot and if you have any questions or comments be sure to leave them here, I'll try to remember to come back to the thread!
  
  Good luck to all participants, the entries have been sick so far!

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