It feels like I’ve been running around on a spiritual journey to make you this gif while testing this specific animation in-game in Arturia… Arturia is a land Jess and Luca (I think gets this credit) named to test her blocks.
Logout
So the Logout animation’s purpose is to visually show when a player is logging out of Boundless. You have around 10 seconds of timeout then the character will disappear/go to sleep or another dimension…basically shutting down.
Again, the animation style/purpose is to relay each action with unique strong poses and have 360 degrees of obvious body language so everyone seeing this animation from near and afar is aware of what that player is visually doing.
Artistically, I’ve been inspired by the meditative action of ‘winding down’ and like the sitting down emote - it’s the ultimate visual cue of taking a breather or having a rest. I’m hoping that we can have a nice bit of vfx for this or at least have the character fading away in code.
Let me know your ideas and thoughts and in the mean time… here’s a gif!
AND this time round just because this looks so epic a picture postcard of my screen!
Was just coming to post this. It looks fantastic but the right leg looks off. But maybe that’s a thing?
I guess some other feedback (minor stuff) is that if the animation is supposed to be about winding down, perhaps you could have him lower himself more gently to the ground? It looks right now like he’s lowering himself to start but falls pretty quickly.
Oh yes - I can certainly polish the foot and leg aesthetics in implementation so it’s more ridged and also gets into place a little quicker which would help the resting foot seem less floppy. It would be a matter of repositioning the foot - which I think will help that.
About the quick decent, yeah, it was done deliberately because with the character’s rig/body proportions it’s actually impossible to cross his legs sitting down. He has little thighs and huge feet - basically, although he’s a biped his proportions are fantasy ones.
One way to get to the floor was to transfer his weight down quickly with his body reclined forward - this would result in him falling down to a sit position with his standing leg being kicked out hence the unavoidable quick decent. (A bit like a trip) His back leg then pushes his front leg out to rest on top of the bottom leg.
Here’s a pic to show this from the side:
That’s also the reason that his sitting down emote is fairly reclined also - it’s a very difficult feat to have this character bend and sit. I’ve therefore used it to better effect for only a few animations as I need to key every frame to avoid any awful interpolation or gimble lock.
Since starting on the main character animations I’ve been really trying to push his character aesthetics to the limit of what I can get out of him with our budget and scope. The first sitting down emote was the first of this journey of seeing how much I can get out of the model in order to be as expressive as it’s possible without breaking. Certainly the logout and sitting down emote embodies this.
Here’s a ‘behind the scene’s’ look at my screen shots last november to highlight the limitations of this model to my fellow artists on our art slack in our active discussions.
As you can see in the ‘sitting revealed’ pic - I’ve highlighted the unseamly aesthetics when bending down. This is because he has very few polygons in his backside and thighs and therefore his body contorts like cardboard when I push bending his body to the max.
The upside to this is that we identified this as a bit of polish that we can certainly do later on (to add more flesh and body to his hips) to make this better as it’s pretty much there.
That’s not a leak haha. It’s just letting us look at the dev tools. A leak is like previously unannounced content. We’ve seen the sitting animation before and the logout animation is at the top of this thread so there’s no new content being explained, just the process being the animation.
