Funny Gunny
Game engine model porting for use in animation
I figured out how to rip assets from Valve source games. Since source film maker isn't for my operating system, I thought It would be cool to see if I can animate source models in Blender, so I did.
Not only was this a test for game animation, but is also a good example on how animators take advantage of unseen parts of a scene to take advantage of "Economy".
Economy is using various techniques to reduce the time animating a scene. For example bluring a tween frame for simulated movement in 2D animation,
or simplifying a one frame action. In this case, all I needed was a bird shadow, not a fully modeled bird.
So all I did was build up, a basic bird silhouette and put a sun light to cast its shadow on the plane.
amimation - Jordan Cruz
Model - Valve
2021
A view of the whole scene. yes the grass, bushes leaves in the background are all but a 360 image
The bird is a lie, just a simple mesh with a fancy shape
And of course, in order to get the bird to cast its shadow in the right spot, it had to be aligned with my sun light just right.
Lastly the horridly confusing armature of the TF2 sentry. typically the bones are a line or pyramid shape stretching from the beginning of a moving body part to the end.
in this case the armature has all of its joints stored in little dots. Not great for animating.