Animator

Animation Reel

Aang rig by Mia Pray, Rijah Kazuo, and Sagar Arun
Hotel Transylvania 4 - Sony Pictures Animation
Spiderman: No Way Home - Marvel + Sony
Zelda rig by Ernesto Ruiz Velasco

Gameplay Work

Password: Eric (case sensitive)

I was contracted by Narwhal Studios to do principle animation for Guild of Guardians, an isometric mobile game, which would be developed further at another studio.

I was brought on-board a team of two, later in the project I was the only animator. My task was to create a library of animations for nine characters and bring them into the engine in two weeks. I created a list of basic cycles - walk, run, attack, deaths - and animated extremely quick and dirty within one week, and dedicated the second week to troubleshooting in-engine and making adjustments. I spent the remainder of the project animating environments, making cinematics, and gameplay demo's.

My goal on this project was to create animations that were responsive and playable in under a tight deadline. While achieving this goal, I also gave each character distinct personalities, and have memorable qualities that would excite players.

Game Jam

Here is a State Machine that I programmed in Unity for a Game Jam with the basic idle, run, jump, and a few more interactions.

I have also done State Machine and implementation work in UE4. I can do basic programming in Java, C#, mel, and python.

Aang Reference Video

Aang Breakdowns

1. Blocking - I copy the poses in my reference video, fast and messy.
I did this one in spline (I usually block stepped) so that I can see there are no rotational/gimbal issues.

2. Adding Breakdowns - Now I'm giving some love to the poses, the lines and curves are readable. There's no weight yet, but the idea of the combo is clear.

3. More Breakdowns - Here I start deviating from the reference video, changing the timing and posing to be more dynamic.
Tightened up the timing and sense of weight so the hits feel impactful.
I also started cleaning up arcs, spacing, and added smears to smooth out the sharpest movements.

4. Polish - Picked out the poses I want players to read and favored them a few more frames.
Tracking arcs on EVERYTHING.
Adding a bit of compression and jiggle for that fleshiness.

There's always more that can be worked on, but my vision is achieved at this stage and I'm happy with the result :)

Dumb Dumb Breakdowns

A big part of my process is drawing my animation in 2d first, and re-drawing over once I've animated in 3d.

I love modelling blendshapes to achieve my 2d look after I've pushed the rig past its limits.

A technique that I used a lot on this project was creating a Sculpt-deformer sphere that would push Zelda's vertices away.

Once I hid this sphere, it became an animatable piece of negative space which was useful in simplifying the silhouette.

The hair was originally rigged with an IK joint chain which I found difficult to work with, so I re-rigged it in FK.

My rig doesn't deform perfectly, but I decided it was more important for the silhouette of the hair to look right, this often took posing each shape frame-by-frame.

Some of the hand signs would disappear when flashed in front of Zelda's face, so I cheated a light that would highlight just the fingers.

This gives the hand sign just enough readability even when it's inside her silhouette.

One of the biggest challenges in this section was making sure the hand signs were reading. In the reference video, many of the hand signs are on screen for only one frame before moving on.

In order to make every hand sign read, I held them on screen for at least two frames, sometimes with a third frame easing-in or out that favored the hand pose.

I would steal frames from the transitions, and replace them with a smear, or I modelled a "multiple" to cover the distance crossed, preventing strobing.