This was the final test in our animation pipeline. We learnt some big lessons, which I’ll go into more detail on in another article. There were two big changes we made after running this test. The first was making a concerted effort to make sure the action in the reference footage looped back to its starting point. All of our animations need to loop and it saves a lot of animation work to have that done in the reference footage rather than in the animation process.

The other big change was moving to using a 3D head and 3D sword instead of using the reference footage. It proved very time consuming for Peter to have to make up the head shape and guess the angle of the sword. Instead he modeled a head and sword and then tracked them into the reference footage. This added step takes a little bit of time but saves far more than it adds.