Polycount/Riot Contest (October-December 2014)

Riot came together with Polycount to put on a great contest for all disciplines. The animation category required a locomotion cycle and an attack with an emphasis on creativity and exaggerated timing. My goal was to match Riot's in-game style (a bit tricky!) along with introducing a unique idea as a base - a character that does her best to wield a weapon that has a mind of its own.

 Walk Cycle 

 Attack

Lessons Learned

1. Learning a new style

Easily the most challenging part of the contest for me. Riot's animation is snappy and stylized. Most of this can be attributed to the genre of League of Legends, it requires fast/readable animations for gameplay purposes.

This is especially evident in the characters' attack animations. They need to communicate to players what skill is about to be used along with showing personality all in 30 frames! That's where smear frames and holds (among other techniques) come into play. It's one thing to identify the animation methods used, but another to properly implement them.

I read the Dev Blog: Champion Animation a ton of times and it certainly helped, though I'm not sure my animation quite matches the style. In my attack there may be too much rotation of the character to be condensed into such a short time and effects would certainly help sell the movement, but I'm satisfied with my first attempt.

 As for the walk I added a "fidget" where the axe tugs and the character trips. A fidget is a special animation that happens randomly during the walk cycle to break it up. Having the animation loop back to back makes it a bit repetitive and not necessarily viable in-engine, but I wanted to add some extra personality.

Things that went right

1. Idea phase

My favorite part of animating- coming up ideas! This can also be a negative, thinking up so many possibilities I certainly over complicated and over thought what I wanted to continue with. My idea process involves blocking things out quickly which helped to an extent. At some point I went with ideas that I believed would fit in the game with its unique camera angle leaning towards readability.

2. Contest community

Polycount offers a great forum for giving and receiving feedback. It was quite the experience to see all levels of animators coming together with a common interest being supportive of one another. Getting feedback from not only other animators, but other contest entrants and forum goers was very helpful.

Credits: 

Stella rig by Animation Mentor

Axe model by Lance Wilkinson