By Reto.Colding, Lead Animator
"... you HEAR ME SOLDIER ? ...Being a FirstPersonShooter is NO excuse for SLACKING POSES ! "
(...Below are screen grabs showing my ambitions on tight and dynamic posing.... SIR!)
"The Tight Grip"
Even though you don't see the hands - apart from a couple of finger tips here and there (in 1st person view) - I still want to cater for when you are up close to your buddy or when screenshots will be made.
You could argue that posing fingers in a dynamic pose is a waste of time... I strongly disagree...
Hand poses are held for a long time and will be prominent in screenshots and will hopefully add to the player experiencing a "tight fit" as expected in a quality game.
On top of this - its actually not that time consuming since you have to pose the hand anyway.
"Key Poses"
Reloading even when its done rather fast is a good way to showcase the ingame weapon.
In this reload case the states of "clip ready for push down" and "clip pushed down" are two major poses.
The Character animation and posing will need to be sharp and tight to accompany the highly detailed weapons and character meshes.
I try to work on the frames that are the clearest (Key Poses).
Also the full body poses needs to be dynamic and portray the action clearly.
Below is an example throwing the Stielhandgranate and to end this post - here is a bit of "moving a Granatwerfer"... its a heavy piece of german metal.
Cheerios - Reto.Colding
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So excited for this...... cant sleep
awesome attention to detial here! most aaa-titles won't have that accurate poses... the granate-throw maybe looks just a bit "cartoonish" and over-styled, but thats a minor critic... as i've sayed most other big titles don't even earn that critism. ;)
awesome job!
yeah i agree maybe tone down the grenade so it is more in tight?
Thanks for the comments! I just talked to Reto.Colding about it, and he agreed that the grenade pose is too cartoonish, but he exaggerated it like that for this blogpost in order to prove his point. :-)
If you wish, you can comment directly on his blog-post on our community-site. Reto.Colding reads all the comments there and usually answers questions:
Heroesandgenerals.com
Cheers!
Awesome !! Good job men !
That is one of the things that annoyed me in the past was poor hand positioning on the weapons. Glad to see the attention to detail guys. Thanks.
I ALWAYS pose fingers (pressure, no clipping, etc etc) even on the other side of a weapon where you don't see them. I also try to use reloads, sprints, draws, and idle animations to showcase as much of the weapon as possible.
Its excellent when major projects like this take these little details in to consideration as well!