Tortor – Combat Moveset
Keyframed in Maya
I have made a combat moveset using my own rig Tortor. He is an ancient Tortoise-like warrior who utilizes his mighty Warhammer and his shell as a shield and to fight off enemies. The rig is complete with SDKs for fingers, IK-switches for arms and legs and has a IK-spine as well. He is able to detach his shield from his back and grasp his weapon in one or two hands. I like characters who have a heavy build and are strong so I had a clear direction when it came to designing him. I am also a big fan of monsters and creatures so that boosted the design when I knew I wanted to make a biped warrior rig.
I wanted to move away from a classic locomotion moveset made for engine and focus on what cool moves I could use his rig for and came up with the shield bash and the fury run.
Shield Bash
The shield bash was a fun way of using the full capabilities of the rig and adding some heavy action to it. I rigged Tortor with the shield in mind to come off at some point but hadn’t come up with something in earlier projects. Now I found just the thing!
The hammer is also a fun tool to animate with its bendy controls and the ability to scale it up when striking a surface.
Fury Run
The fury run was an experiment to showcase the weight of the character and to max out his range of motion. He has stricken me as a character with a lot of rage and therefore an explosive fury run felt appropriate to make. I wanted it to end in a way that felt true to the power of the run so I added a raging scream to really emphasis the action.
To further sell the effect I played around with some camera shakes.
My thoughts on this project
I went for two strong animation sequences rather than making a traditional move set built for engine which I am happy with.
Due to his limbs it is a tricky rig to animate, especially with such a great weapon. I did like this challenge though and had to be quite nifty when animating the more extreme poses by moving the grasp on the hammer up and down and arcing the hammer around where he is near clipping.
What I like most with animating on this character is that everything you do needs to sell the immense weight he embodies. No one is going to believe that he is a five kilo pet tortoise but rather a 3 meter tall giant.