This week, I knew I only needed to finish one last animation before I could finally finish this project. One of the bits of feedback I got from my tutor before we finished for Christmas, was the fact I needed to add more into this final animation, So my plan was to feature a backing away shot before going into my planned sword spin, So I took some time to get the initial posing set-up.

Before then doing a rough block-out of the animation.

It was at this point I had contacted my tutor about the sword position, he showed me that the base of the sword has an extra variable that allows me to swap where I would like to place the sword, one option being in one of the hands.

And then taking further reference footage to gauge how the sword was supposed to move, I used a baseball bat as it was easiest to twirl and I felt as though the smaller size would allow me to capture footage better, and get a quicker swing out of it.

I focused on the finer details like the placement of the character’s fingers and how they interacted with the sword, during the twirl.

After this, I began working on the expressions for the character, as I knew I wanted a lot more out of this animation than just simply having a blank expression. 

And after a lot of adjustments to the twirl, removing keyframes and adding new ones, making sure the animation was smooth enough, and making some sacrifices to posing for the sake of the model, like having to change the final angle the sword is held at, I was finally able to finish off this body mechanics animation.

The final touches were the cloth and hair animations, as I didn’t want too much clipping through objects, and made it a point to constantly monitor the different classing objects.

With this finally finished I was able to finally go back and add in extra details like the sword being held by the hand, and fix any looping issues with each of the animations. 

I also managed to ad skirt animations, and whilst not perfect, I find that it heavily reduced the clipping problems and added some much-needed details into the animations