My name is Janz. I’m the animation artist for Ground Zero and I want to talk about my process when animating Ground Zero’s main character, Seo-Yeon.
In terms of the technical process, I first wait for the character design to be completed by the 3D artist. Then, when the model and textures are finished, I make a rig for the character. There are two rigs: one for animating with controls, drivers, and constraints; and the other one for the game, called “deform bones”. There’ll be some test movements before finishing the rigging process but, with the flow of our work, I’m able to quickly proceed to animate the idle or breathing animations. Then next will be the more complex animations such as the movement animations, pain and death animations, etc.
When it comes to animating each character, they all have their own differences in terms of their movements, their weight, and their combat, to ensure that they all move in a unique way. Animating Seo-Yeon started with very generic movements, then lead developer James and I discussed together how she should move based on her character and what she’d be doing in the game. When animating her, I got some inspiration from the anime Spy x Family, but not all of her movements were inspired by the anime.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2340130/Ground_Zero/
The challenging part when it came to animating Seo-Yeon was having to learn how to animate full body characters, because I started my career in first person shooter type animations and realised that I hadn’t learnt how to create fully body character animations properly. But James believed in me, invested in me, and encouraged me to learn and to become a fully fledged animator. The other difficulty for me was exploring Blender on my own and taking a trial-and-error approach, since not all of the answers for the animation questions I had could be found on Google. It was fun though and I’ve learned a lot this way!
My favorite animation that I’ve done for Seo-Yeon so far is her stomp, which you can see in the clip below.
What aspects of Ground Zero would you like to know more about in future developer diaries? Let us know in the comments 💬
