This is a submission for the Agora Community's animation challenge for March 2024, with a theme of martial arts.
With the availability of Azula Rig for this challenge and wanting to focus on one's body mechanics, I found the perfect combination of inspiration for me to animate my own martial arts. Since it is a solo animation, I wanted her move sets to still create a story, so I came up with the idea to use rocks as a conflict that changes its size across time. Azula being confident at first then getting annoyed by a small rock perfectly encapsulates her perfectionist character, which makes her unstable and eventually leads to using all her abilities up to the end. The entire animation was done in Autodesk Maya, and sound effects were added in After Effects.
Final submission with sound effects
This is the first pass of animation where I focused on key poses.
In-betweens were implemented, and timings were adjusted.
Details and aggression were added to make the movements more natural. The camera was adjusted to highlight body movements and mimic the feel of ATLA's introduction.
First passes for skirt, shoulder cloth, and hand animations were implemented.
Animations for the hair and face were added.
Rocks were added as a part of the story.
Implementation of camera shakes
Lightning was added here while the camera shake was temporarily turned off to test if the lightning animation was good enough without it.
Fire effects were added internally with Maya, and camera shake returned.
Environments were added to add impact to the camera shake. The fire effects were changed to match the limb movements. Multiple polishes were applied all throughout the character's movements, especially in areas where some faces were clipped.