It’s been quite a few months since I last posted about a 3D animation, but that ends today! Around a year ago, I wrote about creating a “hit combo” animation. And now I have another one to share! With that original hit combo, I created the motion using a layered workflow. This basically means I animated the motion of the character’s core, and then I layered on the movement of the arms, legs, head, etc. (Read more about that here). This time around, I wanted to create a similar kind of motion, but using the pose-to-pose workflow. I’ve discussed this method a bunch in recent posts.

I first establish my keyposes, breakdowns, and then add in the in-betweens. My overall goal was to to see if I could create an animation that had similar flow and energy to its layered counter-part.

Since it’s a “hit combo” the character’s has to be hitting something, right? Unlike last time, where the target was another character, this time I changed things up.

You ever use a computer, a phone, or maybe a printer? Great tech that make our lives infinitely easier. But sometimes, (though it feels like most times) they don’t work the way you expect them to. Sometimes your computer freezes, it crashes. A printer jams, maybe the queue’s full for no reason. A program might crash when you’re working on something, and you lose hours of work. All these things can be a little frustrating at best and absolutely infuriating at worst. That’s what I’m going for with this animation. Human vs. Machine, and the collective desire to throw our laptops out the window. And the instant regret we feel when we do…

Like I said, I used a pose-to-pose workflow to make this. I have a little shot progression you can check out to see each step in the workflow process:

I’m fairly happy with the results! I feel as though I’ve captured some of the energy and flow I’ve had with the layered animations. On top of that, I had much more control over the poses and overall silhouette of the character throughout the process.

As always, I’d like to thank AnimState and Agora Community members for giving me invaluable feedback through Syncsketch. If you’d like to see the notes and feedback I received, check out this Syncsketch link.

Thank you so so much for reading!

Maya Viewport VFX by Shadrak Guichard-Foster
Jessica Rig by Thomas Weigand

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