I’m back once again with another little animation breakdown! This time around I returned to the Star Wars universe. Star Wars media takes of lot of aesthetic and narrative cues from old Westerns, so I figured it would be fun to lean into that. But I also wanted to inject a little contrast in there by featuring one of the more awkward droids there is; the pit droid. The excellent Pit Droid Rig by Volgar was a great fit.

In-universe, pit droids are little repair droids that stand about 3 feet tall and fix up starships and other Star Wars-y vehicles. They’re depicted as being a little derpy and awkward, and they fold up into a little compact tripod under certain circumstances. With all this in mind, here’s the final animation (with sound too):

In keeping with the conceptual contrast I mentioned earlier, I wanted the character to hit a few “classic” and “cool” gunslinger poses while also feeling a bit lanky and janky. While the overall proportions of the pit droid go a long way to accomplish the latter, I also needed this reflected in the motion itself. The blaster should look slightly big in the character’s hand, that way it makes sense when they swing it around more wildly than they should. I wanted the droid to feel a bit jumpy and lighter on their feet so there’s a couple small hops in there early on to push this idea. Plus there’s that big surprised jump at the end.

Workflow-wise, I continued to use the pose-to-pose workflow that I mentioned a couple posts ago. The main goal of this animation was to practice that workflow, but with LOTS more poses. I spent a bit of prep time before filming my reference footage just looking at old gunslinger poses that the character could strike. Then I filmed a bit of reference with those in mind, and was off to the races. Here’s a shot progression breakdown, starting from keyposes and ending with the final animation:

I’m really quite happy with how it turned out! It’s slightly longer and more complex than my last two pose-to-pose focused animations, and it really helped me nail down that workflow.

In hindsight, there’s a few changes I’d make to the earlier poses. Right now the beginning is lacking a bit in pose and screen space contrast. The character is in a standing position in one section of the screen for maybe a little too long, even when the pose changes. That eventually gets resolved later with the jump, but I probably could’ve introduced a bit more variety to the poses earlier on. Regardless, these lessons have been learned, and I’ll bring those ideas to future animations!

I want to thank SyncSketch users Roman, TalkingSkunk, Dhairya D. Vijay, and dgsg for their extremely helpful feedback throughout this process. If you’d like to see previous versions of this animation, as well as the feedback I received, check out the SyncSketch project.

Thanks so much for taking the time to watch this animation and to read my post. It really does mean a lot to me, thank you!

Star Wars DUM Droid Rig by Volgar
Mandalorian Blaster Rig by Josh Mucca
Maya Viewport VFX by Shadrak Guichard-Foster

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