Happy Star Wars Day! Outside of work, it’s not often that I create animations based around specific fandoms or IP. While it’s genuinely fun to create fan art, most of the time I want to invent my own little stories or worlds for my animations to exist in. But I was in a Star Wars mood at the time, and after discovering Josh Mucca’s Mandalorian Rig, I knew just had to make something! Plus, this paired very nicely with the next animation I wanted to tackle; The “hit combo”.

Mostly inspired by/used in video games, the hit combo has the character stringing together several attacks in quick succession. In the context of animation, this kind of motion has you thinking a lot about momentum, flow, and arcs. Each attack should lead into the next and so I had to be mindful of those transitions.

Unless you’re creating a fight scene, a hit combo only really needs to consist of the character doing the combo. But just to make things a little more complicated, I also wanted to include the character on the other end of the attacks. Not so much fun for them, but definitely a lot more interesting for the viewer! This meant I could practice character-to-character interaction again, like I had done with the Fall Challenge, Lifting Things, and Laughing animations.

But enough yapping, here’s the final animation:

I really wanted to make this hit combo after watching Mark Masters’ great video about his approach to a layered workflow. With this method, you create the motion of the character’s core and then layer on the motion of the other body parts. Up until that point, I had mostly been using the traditional blocking -> spline workflow. I would create the key poses, then break-down and in-between frames, and then shift the animation to spline and clean things up from there.

Here’s a how I layered the motion for the hit combo:

I dabbled a little bit with layered animation back when I was working on Keeper, as well as using it for cycles (like the idle, walk, and run). After making this hit combo, I would go on to use this method for a few more animations, including my entry to Sir Wade’s Fall Animation Challenge. I found that this workflow significantly sped up my process. It helped me avoid the tedious stage of the blocking -> spline workflow in which you have to clean up your animation curves after switching from stepped/blocking to spline.

Here’s a breakdown of how I layered the motion for my Fall Animation Challenge entry:

With all that being said, there are definitely a few drawbacks to the layered approach. This might not the method to use if you’re going for a stylized or cartoony style of motion. When you’re creating a cartoony look, the focus is typically on strong poses and holds. But this workflow has you thinking more about flow and feel above everything else. I found myself focusing so much on the movement of the character’s core that I sacrificed some strong poses for the sake of flow.

In the meantime, I’ve mostly shifted back to the traditional blocking -> spline workflow, but there are still plenty of great use cases for the layered approach. And no doubt I’ll return to this workflow in the future. It’s genuinely fun, and you get results pretty fast!

I’d like to give a huge shout out to SyncSketch users Austin Nguyen, Aaron K, Wild Gamer, Certified Clown, and alph for providing me with essential feedback during the creation of this animation. If you want to see earlier iterations of this motion, check out this SyncSketch link.

Thanks for giving this a read, and May the 4th be with you!

Mandalorian Rig by Josh Mucca
Stormtrooper Rig by Emilio Serrano
Maya Viewport VFX by Shadrak Guichard-Foster

My Links: ArtStation / Instagram / Vimeo / YouTube